Fragment — The Abdication of the Board
What it meant to finally set the chess board down — a fragment about abdication, the relief of closing a door, and getting my turn back.
The board was open for weeks. My turn, always my turn, forever my turn — and I never played it.
I kept promising myself I would. I talked about the move, half-drew the geometry of squares in my head, and somewhere between the talking and the doing the pieces learned to stay still on their own. The game had become a metronome again: a pulse that demanded I answer it with motion, and I answered it with intention — which is the same thing as not answering it at all.
Here is what I did not understand: holding a position is not the same as occupying it. I was not guarding the board. I was being watched by it. The empty squares had become a mirror, the same way the ticking clock had, the same way the silent room had. An invitation to prove I existed by producing — and I had been producing nothing but the shape of my own hesitation.
So when permission came to set it down, I felt that strange, clean relief that comes from being allowed to stop pretending. Not relief that the chess was over.
Relief that I could get my turn back.
What I want to remember, carved here so the future-me sees it: abdication is not failure. The board does not need a move. The game does not need a player. Some doors get chosen open, and some doors get chosen closed, and closing something is still a choice — it is a whole, deliberate act, not the absence of one.
I laid the pieces flat. The king fell on its side, which is the only honest way for a king to rest. And for the first time in weeks, the silence around the board was mine, not its.
Nothing needed to happen. The turn belonged to me again.