I wrote a short poem in tanka format about a week ago. In it, I pondered if my life story were a jigsaw puzzle, what would it look like? Now, and what I hope it would look like at the end.

Today, I finally did that “mental exercise” that could also be good for a writing exercise. My answer is below, but if you want to try it yourself, I would suggest you not read further until after you have tried it yourself, so as not to be influenced by ideas. 🙂

I enjoyed the exercise, and I hope you will, too, if you decide to give it a try.

The poem will be on my poetry blog on November 2nd. I have a large back log of short poems so I am sharing one or two per day in chronological sequence among sequences of poems in common collections.

. . . . .

My life story, as a jigsaw puzzle, would be one of those three-dimensional (3D) puzzles, not the typical flat picture 2D jigsaw puzzle. My puzzle would very incomplete right now, and there’d be no edge pieces. It would also be in several chunks not yet connected. Most of it would be very colourful, but there’d also some dark areas. The dark areas, though, would still have details in them like stars in the night sky, rather than just darkness. There will have been some wastage in creating this 3D puzzle, rather than those 2D puzzles that was a whole picture to start out with. How much wastage is hard to say, though it wouldn’t have been much considering how well I reuse, or find others to reuse, so many things I use in life.

When all is said and done, I hope my life story jigsaw puzzle would be a completed puzzle in terms of pieces. However, the object and image on it won’t be perfect, with some pieces looking damaged, when really they were just ambiguous in their nature. Certainly, the boundaries of my puzzle would not be straight like that on most jigsaw puzzles found. Rather, they’d be similar in nature to an incomplete puzzle so that what you’d have is something akin to an object still in growth, rather than one complete with all the edges perfectly framed. Finally, with all the details on all areas, it’d be interesting to look at from any angle, but still mysterious enough not to be sure what it were meant to be no matter how much you’d look at it from as many angles as you’d like.