Captured Kings and Captured Hearts (or, “The Shape of a Life”)

I learned to play chess in sixth grade. Mrs. Van Winkle taught us what the different pieces did and set up a series of classroom-wide chess tournaments. I won a game or two. But, at the end of the day, I was mediocre at best. I met my match in Sarah Turner, who sat by the pencil sharpener, wore cute bows in her curly hair, and knew how to use the knights to destroy me. She handily captured both my king and my 11 year-old heart.

It was a whirlwind romance. I use the term “romance” liberally, in the sense that she wasn’t aware we were involved romantically. Though we clearly were, since, among other things, we hung our coats in the same closet at school, along with 24 other kids. Actually that was it. There weren’t “other things.”

Cozy chess vibes. (Isla Verde, Guatemala; May 2022)

Sarah Turner vaguely knew my name. She occasionally acknowledged my presence. This was sufficient for me. It was enough to count the tight curls unspooling in dirty blonde helixes onto those slight shoulders, to dreamily correct her when she called me John (“Oh, you’re thinking of John Shipman, he still wets his pants. I’m Joey, I don’t wet my pants very much unless my mom buys me a Big Gulp, then, if I’m being honest, anything can happen.”)

It was somehow sunny all the time those days. Just sunlight, baby blue sky, green grass, the musty smell of cheap cardboard chessboards. It never seemed to rain on any of us, not on my thick glasses and spindly small town arms, not on Sarah Turner’s innocent, arcing eyebrows shaped like the tails of two shooting stars.

I know it rained, I know we lost pawns and bishops and knights and lined up their empty husks beside the board. I just can’t remember it. Can’t recall the clouds or any of those chess matches ever ending. In my memory, they just go on and on in sunny spirals, kings and queens skipping across a young girl’s shy, thin smile.

Cozy boat vibes. (Santa Cruz La Laguna, Guatemala; May 2022)

Now it’s more than thirty years later and it’s raining hard. Dusk like charcoal slides across the surface of an angry Lake Atitlan in the middle of the Guatemalan highlands. Shannon says it’s considered the most beautiful lake in the world. She does not cite any authority for this conclusory statement, nor does she need to. Whatever Shannon says is true. God sculpted her all fair and flawless from a pretty little clump of truth, that’s why.

The rain is a roar on the thin roof of this small, open air restaurant teetering on the lip of the lake. Violet is my daughter. She’s ten, she’s hunched over a game of chess, nestled beside a little orange fire in the corner. I watch it flick firelight all over the chessboard, all over Violet’s soft, pretty face.

Santa Cruz La Laguna; May 2022

I haven’t played chess since sixth grade. Violet is holding her own against me, and I’m absently thinking for the first time in decades about Mrs. Van Winkle’s classroom, the way the sunlight spilled across the chessboards and splashed onto Sarah Turner’s pretty, angular face. I smile a little. Where is she now?

My phone in my hand. A quick Google search between turns. A photo of a gravestone in my hometown with her name and her face on it. She’s been gone for twenty years, down in the ground in a cemetery I used to walk through on my way to the store for packs of gum.

Sunshine girl. (Lake Atitlan; May 2022)

It never rained in those days, but it’s raining now. I suddenly hear it coming, feel it hammering on my bones, breaking them down, little by little by little. Time is wet, time is rain. It seeps down. She was twenty-five when it snuffed out her sunny spirals and tucked her into the dirt.

Violet is thinking hard beside me, brow furrowed at the chessboard. She’s surrounded by rain. But somehow it doesn’t touch her. My eyes trace the shape of her life, shining out through her fingertips, booming from her brown eyes, rising off her skin in colors only hearts can see. It’s sunny all the time in the folds of her small, beautiful soul. I scoot a little closer. And together we breathe innocent, arcing breaths shaped like the tails of two shooting stars.