Scrabbled Messages

Before you taught me how to make love with a sense of humor or how to paint like Jackson Pollock with a shotgun instead of a brush, you taught me the true and secret method to playing Scrabble.

"Okay, so the first rule is the most important" you whispered conspiratorially over the empty board between us, "and that's no real words whatsoever. You got that?"

We sat on the floor to her living room. A single candle was lit and not a drop of light more. There was an air of seance about the whole affair as if at any moment we would cast the tiles like runes across the grid and attempt to divine our fortunes from their fall. Glancing down at the seven letters in my rack, one of them being a "!" for five points, I informed you that I did not, in fact, understand and nor was I likely to after only a single bowl between us. With smirking patience you elaborated -

"You have to make up a word - not a proper noun, mind you - but a new word entirely. Then you have to explain what that word means. Extra points for humor and originality."

I told you it all sounded a bit too relative. How does one quantify 'humor' and 'originality' after all? What makes me laugh often leaves other people to dwell in awkward silence far longer than they care to. You dismissed these concerns with a wave of your dirty glass of merlot. A splash of the red splattered across the grid in its wake... a blood sacrifice across the game's altar. You explained with what I knew would be your last attempt at doing such -

"Think of it this way: the game isn't a test of what you know but rather what you can create."

Having capitulated to far stranger and sadder demands than this to bed a woman I agreed with a smile and a shrug that said - 'Ladies first' (while not necessarily referring to the game at hand but rather an all encompassing philosophy in general).

Your first word was 'SVOD'. A type of soil, you declared, common to Eastern European graveyards that served as a vital nutrient for the regeneration of vampires and revenants.

I began with 'VOPEN' which was the act of creating an access point through the center of a vortex. You found it suspiciously close to 'OPEN' but, going easy on me, allowed it anyway. A refill of our glasses and we continued. Through the evening we placed down the tiles diligentantly, creating a story between us from a spontaneous lexicon equal parts whim and strategy. When the candle sputtered out against the encroaching shadows, you leaned across the board and we shared our first kiss - or 'FISS' - which I played for the triple word score.

It would be a year and a half later when I would come home from the club to find you gone. The closet empty. The mutual CD collection picked and plucked clean of your favorites. The bookshelf sifted free from your old atlases and dog earred Jane Austen classics. Frantic I tried calling you but found quickly you had changed the number. I tried your office but they said you quit earlier that week. Friends and family didn't answer or return my increasingly loud pleas for a return call. Finally, at the end of the night, drinking the last glass of Shiraz you left me, I stumbled towards bed. There on the pillow was your note. Written in Scrabble tiles and arranged carefully. It read -

"JACK

TOGIM FOREASE UWD!

QISES

A"

I sat on the edge of the bed just staring at this dadaistic ransom note you left in place of a goodbye. All I could see in it was my own name. This was no accident I was sure. A comment on my own self-absorbtion? Or was it simply that that was my name and would have been immune from the rules of the game? Straining to decipher your message I read into it a confession of a love that could not be, a mission statement for your new life without me, an affair's brutal truth, a code that would one day lead me to wherever it was you ran to.

Knowing none of these were the answer I scooped up the tiles, threw down the letters and from then I wrote the end of our story.