the board
the board is a grid. eight by eight. sixty-four squares alternating light and dark. it's a battlefield, an architecture, a set of assumptions made visible. someone decided to create a world divided into light squares and dark squares and named them and called it a game, and then people spent five hundred years treating it like science and art and religion bc it's all of those. chess is calculation and chess is beauty and the board is where they meet. the grandmasters who play at the high level see beautiful moves the way a painter sees light. theres a whole aesthetic to it - the elegance of a sacrifice that appears as a concession, the brutality of a quiet move that blows the game wide open. i always loved that about chess. that it rewards you for seeing, and that the seeing itself is the art.
(theres smth about that feels inherently like faith actually. the belief that if you name every square and follow every rule then chaos becomes manageable. that if you impose enough structure the world will cooperate. chess players believe this. catholics believe this. you believed this.)
the columns are called files, a through h. the rows are ranks, 1 through 8. so every square has a name. we can start on a1. the corner. the origin. the beginning of everything.
you believed in order. the house had its system: shoes by the door, rice in the cooker in the morning, meat defrosted by the time you got home, house spotless when guests were over, church on sunday. there was a liturgy to the way you kept the world running. you ran the household the way infrastructure runs. continuous, silent, and invisible. no one thinks about it until it goes down.
you'd pick up the knight first. i know you would.
the knights look like horses. out of all of the pieces you'd go straight for the one shaped like a living thing. you'd hold it up and ask me what the horse wants to do.
you liked animals. dolphins were your favorite. you swam with them at the aquarium. you wore dolphin necklaces and bought dolphin sculptures for the house. and you watched nature documentaries while folding laundry. you'd stop folding when the dolphins came on, delighted. and i'd watch you watching them, happy with how happy they made you. your urn has dolphins on it.
can you travel across the board? a1 to h8.