My jigsaw. My Life.

When I was young, I liked putting jigsaw puzzles back together, spending few days sitting on the ground puzzling about puzzles. I dare not say I was expert in it but I simply enjoyed the feeling of "putting the pieces together" to form back the magnificent scenery and beautiful landscape. After finishing it, I would glue it on a manila board and pass to my mother to frame it and hang on the wall.

I remember I once finished a 2000-piece puzzle with such a magnificent picture: A little wood house with layers of bright and yellowish flowers smiling to welcome the arrival of summer, with the background of snowy mountains where ices were starting to melt. Actually, it wasn't really a "finished" article. After long hours of "puzzling", there was one piece of snow jigsaw missing. So unfortunate. I had been finding it for days, searching every corner in the room and just couldn't find that one small piece. I finally gave up.

The missing space would be very obvious if the puzzle were to be displayed on the wall, but I would be very pity if the puzzle were not to be displayed after spending enormous efforts. Hence I filled in the space by creating a jigsaw piece from hard manila card, cutting it into the shape that can fit and painting it with water colours. Of course it wasn't a magnificent piece but from distance one could hardly tell the difference.

The story didn't end there. Few years later, in the midst of relocating fittings in my room and rearranging my stuffs, I have spotted a piece of puzzle on the ground. I took it, looked at the wall picture and realized:"a-ha, it's you!". After few years of silence, out of nowhere the missing piece reappeared. Time certainly is a magician but since the puzzle had been glued, there was no way for the piece to be put together. It has lost its function and became purely sentimental. So I kept it separately for my memory.

Those days of putting puzzles were gone, but patience and crave to classify pieces developed from it still remain. Sometimes I wonder, life is just like jigsaw puzzles, both of them are about the satisfaction of putting the pieces together. We are given so many different jigsaws and it's entirely up to us to decide how to put it together. Putting it nicely, it becomes scenery; putting it badly, it becomes disaster.

The only difference is, jigsaw puzzles' width and length are predetermined by others; but life's width and length are determined by us. There will always be missing pieces, but there will always be extra space as well. For me, I just want to collect more and more pieces and putting them together to form a larger and more beautiful picture.