What a pity! What a pity!
I’d say it’s a spectrum, but it’s not – I’m not here, or I’m there.
It’s the summer of 2016, and I’m 12 years old in chess class. I’m playing with a boy who towers over me, so that he physically has to bend his spine to see the board. The game is intense, and I’m reminded of why I love chess.
The students gather around, and our instructor is focused on the board, calculating all the variations and doing the back and forth he does as if he could read our minds, in my case, which he probably could. Somehow or other, my position is strong, and in the next move, I can take his queen. Everyone sees it, everyone’s holding their breath, and the instructor is practically on edge.
But I move my pawn. Because I didn’t see what everyone else saw. But I also wasn’t seeing any grand vision; I was winging it, just like I do in life.
And the kids murmured and dispersed. But the instructor absolutely lost it; he turned to me, his eyes bulging, and yelled, ‘What a pity! What a pity!’ and pointed to the queen just sitting there.
And this reaction is quite accurate for how I imagine all the elders, spirits, and God react as I make decisions in my life. It is also the reaction I have to myself as I consciously choose not to do things I like. As this year comes to a close, as I come dangerously close to ageing, I think about how this is one of the memories I don’t particularly want to keep reliving.
Finals season is funny because when I’m supposed to be studying, I dig up all the things I wish I had done and go into a spiral so deep that sometimes I end up embracing the earth and lying in my grave. During the exams themselves, my internal monologue goes down a rabbit hole of memories that have been relived so many times they have a catchphrase of their own. I’d say it’s a spectrum, but it’s not – I’m not here, or I’m there.
I remember when I had to change schools, I asked myself what the worst that could happen was. I have a list I could give her now. Memories are always fickle, but hoarding them is like a hug that burns as it grows longer. It’s comforting, until it isn’t.
A lot of my speech today begins with the dreaded ‘I used to…’ almost as if somewhere along the way, I murdered all the verbs in my life and descended to a pit of stagnation and rot. A lot of these recollections are prompted by how I was forced to clean my desk and stumbled upon my newspaper and magazine collections from the 2010s, something my mother impassively reckoned I should throw away.
There are years’ worth of time in these nooks and crannies: packages and folders that were placed snugly into these corners when we first moved here over a decade ago. They still feel the same and fit into the hollow of my palm the way they did all those years ago.
The ink smells faintly of a distant childhood. Every article I once clipped, every doodle I once made, seems to whisper of a story left midway. It’s like the queen on the board, staring at me now from decades ago, ever-present in my peripheral view. But I don’t see her. I set the folder down carefully, as if carefulness could undo the past, and the hollow ache of unsaid words spreads from my chest to my fingertips.
Time stored in paper and glue feels heavier than any pawn or rook; it presses in, insistent, accusing, as if to say that all the games I’ve ever played were filled with pieces I left unmoved, choices unmade.
And as I sift through yellowed paper, half-lived stories, and the ghosts of verbs I no longer conjugate, I realise how, at any given moment, there are so many combinations of decisions that could have been made, and at the end of the day, all of it comes back to this queen and my little mental chessboard.
What a pity – what a pity it is that I didn’t take his queen. But what relief it is that I see her now.
[Featured image: Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Optician’s Sign (1902), oil on canvas.]