A Road Less Travelled

Um, I wasn’t actually planning on writing this. I sat down to write and felt like there wasn’t anything to say so I started writing whatever came to mind just so the page wouldn’t be blank. And then it was so lyrical I had to finish it and now I am sharing it with ya’ll. You have my humblest apologies.

I need to write something. I’m just fiddling my time away with Sudoku, the numbers swirling in my mind even after the book is down and the light is off. The world is turning into numbers in grids, rows, ordered and precise. I pencil down possibilities, possibilities that reduce, shrink, narrow until there is one option and it is penciled in dark and deep. With each number written down the rest of the grids, the rows revolve and shift. What once had been a two, a five, a seven now can only be five or two which makes that number over there a four. The world on the nine by nine grid is simple, scientific, clean, sterile almost. I clutter it with the possibilities when I know it wants simplicity and order. As the possibilities shrink the clutter fades until soon there is only one number in each box and the nine by nine is as it should be. My imagination wants to assign personality, emotion to the numbers on the page, but the grid restrains me. There is no room for imaginings or fanciful musings. The Sudoku page is a place that is here, is now. It is without any thought about what that means or whether it is happy about it. I should hate Sudoku. The grid should repulse me, the numbers offend, the rows a final insult. Instead I dream in Sudoku, like a new color just invented in my mind. The grid is a friend if such a word can be used for something so impersonal. The numbers are like tools or puzzle pieces familiar to the hand. The rows just one more place for me to assert my mind and hold dominance. Sudoku and I have reached an accord. There is peace between us and so I rejoice, pick up my pencil and open to Guru Puzzle 4.