puzzle pieces

It’s like when you’re almost finished with a puzzle. Not that kiddie stuff, with the ABCs and some nice cartoon drawings of Arthur. I’m talking about those 500 or maybe even thousand piece puzzles. The ones that seem really simple, a picturesque sunset or some bucolic scene, but when you start to do them you realize that all those pieces? They look the same, and it’s actually a lot more complicated than you thought. But now the tape is broken, that box is open, so you have to finish. Maybe you start with the edge pieces, and from them you make the framework. That way you have a general idea of what it will look like when it’s done. Next you move on to the inside pieces, and sorting through those is hard. Eventually, though, by doing a little every day it starts to come together. And then, finally, you’ve reached the end. You’re fitting together the chunks you’ve completed, and man you can almost see it now. It’s starting to look just like the picture on top of the box, exactly what you expected. You’re really on a roll now, and soon there’s just one gap left in the puzzle. You pick up the last piece and triumphantly place it…only to realize it doesn’t fit. It’s the wrong piece. Somewhere along the way, you got some things mixed up, joined together things that didn’t belong, and you have no idea where you went wrong. And you step back and look at this disastrous masterpiece, and you only have three options. You can find the piece you put in the wrong place, undo that whole part of the puzzle, and then put it back together again. But unraveling can be so hard, and putting things back the way they were? That’s even worse. Maybe instead you could just cram the piece in your hand into the one space left. You can make it work, right? That could be kind of tricky though, and you might even end up breaking the piece or something. And how comfortable can that be, sticking a piece somewhere it doesn’t belong? You’re down to your last option. Forget the piece, forget the puzzle, and just leave the little hole. People won’t really notice. After all, the only difference between that perfect picture on the top of the box and your “completed” puzzle is just one missing piece. And how obvious can that be?