Jigsaw Puzzles

How do you create the picture of a life? Is it something that can be painted? or sketched? or photographed? My brother is a hell of an artist and I'm a pretty fucking good photographer and I honestly can't see either one of us coming up with just the right kind of imagery that would definitively represent life as I see it these days. For some reason lately I have come to envision my life as some sort of warped jigsaw puzzle. I just know that if I can ever get all these fucking pieces to fit together somehow that it will be a beautiful thing. (I do have a sneaking suspicion though that one of the problems with the puzzle in my box is that I have more than one puzzle to work with here. It seems to be that someone with a really twisted sense of humor threw a bunch of different puzzles into the same box and it has somehow become my task, my quest, to get them all sorted out. I'm not quite sure who that someone is or why they thought it might be fun to watch me attempt to sort all this out, but then the universe is full of fun little mysteries like that, isn't it?) Most people I know who work jigsaw puzzles seem to follow the tried-and-true pattern of finding all the edge pieces and putting them together first so that they at least have some sort of framework to start with and then they can work their way inward to fill out the middle. I get that. It makes sense. I generally don't work puzzles that way, but then logic usually doesn't figure it's way into most of my behaviors, so why should puzzle working be any different? I do however recognize the importance of those edge pieces and their inherent ability to contain the puzzle as a whole. In the puzzle of my life, those edge pieces are my friends and family. They help to define who I am. The problem here is that those edge pieces are getting harder and harder to find. I have a couple of those pieces that have been lost entirely and have left gaping holes in their wake. I have others that keep skittering toward the edge of the table and threatening to slide off the edge where they will undoubtedly slide across the floor and end up under the couch or behind the refrigerator and I might never find them again. I can't afford to lose any more of my edge pieces. They were rare enough to begin with. I can't finish this fucking puzzle without them. At this point I'm tempted to glue some of them to the fucking table to keep them from getting lost. Even if I manage to hold this framework together, what then? Do I (or will I) have enough memories, and knowledge, and hopes, and dreams, and accomplishments to fill in the empty spaces in the middle? Will I be terribly sad if I don't? Is everything else a waste if there are still leftover gaps and spaces and I have nothing to fill them in with? Is the joy of putting a puzzle together it's own reward? Or does the finished result have to be amazing in order to make the process of completing it worthwhile? Puzzles are tenuous art at best. Even if you do manage to finish putting one together, they are nothing but broken pieces held together mostly by whim. They are fragile. They are perpetually cracked and fragmented and can be taken apart in an instant. Is it pointless to try and put my puzzle together at all? Is it worth the time and effort? Or should I just throw the pieces back in the box, close the lid, and put everything back in the closet to collect dust? There are lots and lots of questions that I need answered and when all is said and done, I guess I'm the only one that can answer them. No one else is ever really going to care if my puzzle gets finished. They all have their own to work on. That's how life works. We all sit at our own little tables, moving the pieces around, and hoping to God we have everything we need and that somehow they will all fit together just right. Sometimes people come over to help us, and those days are great, but most of the time it is a solitary game that we have to finish for ourselves or else choose not finish at all.

"Where do you go to get a new life when the old one has you so puzzled you don't know how to fix it?" -- Laurell K. Hamilton - "Cerulean Sins"