Playing the Game

“Chess--I know how to play,

but not how to win.”

     -Overheard at a restaurant

 

The rules of this chess flew like circling hawks,

landing here and there when invoked

or hovering above, ready to assert themselves

as needed until the game was won.

 

But the game was for other people,

the pretty ones, the popular, me being

the wallflower shuffling like an abandoned cat

at the margin of the high school dance

throbbing in the gym after a football game,

the slippery eel of self-doubt hooked in my throat.

The playbook for this chess was not in my library.

 

I suffered outside the flirt game, and even more

for actual romance: prom, his arms encircling my waist,

mine curled around his neck in that longed-for

slow dance, low lights and music pushing, pushing lips

into kisses, the extravagant touching claimed by others

who knew how to win that game.

 

These days I play solo chess with no rules

but my own.  I’m still that strange wallflower

but I know how to walk alone, I give myself permission

to dance.  I plow and seed my own land,

 I mule along outside of that old game. 

The regrets clank on in a black alley inside me

with neither welcome nor map. But maybe that’s me

discovering another way to win.

 

J. Pratt-Walter (c) 2022

                                                                  The Wallflower