The original cubes you could dismantle into component parts, revealing the inner workings before slotting and clicking the colours back into place, bypassing the entire puzzle in favour of the purely mechanical effort of assembling the coloured sides. It was an exercise in reconstruction rather than revelation, destroying something to rebuild it as it should be, all parts perfectly in place without the hard work.The new ones, smaller than the ones of my youth, though my larger hands might create this illusion, probably work the same way, the partial cubes that make up individual face colours backed with an almost arrowhead of plastic to slot and grip in the central stems around which the rows and columns twist when wrenched this way and that in an effort to find the solution.
We sit on opposite sofas and I try to make sense of what you tell me. You explain what has gone wrong for you and I slot that into place with the reasons you gave for why we can’t go on like this. I slide the puzzle of our relationship around in my head but it is impossible to keep track as you throw more colours into the mix. Somehow the cube has more than six sides, colours have been added beyond the traditional red, white, blue, yellow, green and orange. The rows and columns increase in size to accommodate the added purple and pink, grey and brown and more.
‘I can’t work this out,’ I say, my mind twisting and turning what you have said further and further into disorder.
‘There’s nothing to work out,’ you say.
I look at the bags, packed and ready at your feet and realise the puzzle is already in pieces and no matter how hard I push they won’t fit back together.
Image from schools-wikepedia. Used under Creative Commons licence.
16 comments:
The Rubik's cube imagery works well, and comparing it now to how the narrator saw it when he was younger, as he learns this lesson about grown-up relationships. Good stuff.
Fascinating analogy made visual! Cleverly done, and it's sad and wonderful how it's brought back to puzzles solved easily as a child. How much complication can grow, as an adult. Thanks for sharing this.
Great analogy. Now I'll try not to think about the fact that I've never solved a Rubik's Cube. Enjoyed, thanks.
Gorgeous. Simple, powerful and striking. Made me feel so very sorry for him, without any obvious emotional string pulling; elegantly done.
Very, very good!
As he learned, and unlike puzzles, relationships are exercises in revelation rather than reconstruction.
And the hard work can't be avoided.
Enjoyed.
An apt description for any relation. Sometimes the puzzle comes together, sometimes not. Great story!
Don't we wish relationships were as easy as peeling the stickers of that damn rubix cube.
Great piece
Dan - Great metaphor - as an analytical, mathematically inclined person myself, relationships can mystify me as well. Where's the formula? How do i figure out the variables? Love it!
Haha I used to do that too - the pulling apart to reconstruct of the cube and also the trying to fit the relationship puzzle together and failing. Great link here Dan - I think you really nailed this one. (PS you have a weird apostrophe in 'one's' up the top of the story...)
I liked this a lot. His sorrow comes through all the more for not having been explicitly spoken.
Great piece
THis was a different look at relationships but also a 'duh' factor. Yeah, they are a lot like this, making me smack my own forehead and say DUH. Great work. Good to see you here. ;)
Great take. Relationships are a lot more complicated than the cubes.
FWIW, I used to take them apart, too.
A clever analogy, and a well written story.
The colours and formulae (cubic equations?) make me think this is about more than an analogy: the narrator feels deeply disconnected from their soon-to-be-leaving partner. They feel male (reconstruction, mechanical, large hands) and the way they interact with the world, their disorientation, makes me wonder if this is a story in part about Aspergers? If I've read this incorrectly I apologise - it's a great 'twist' on those wonderful cubes anyway!
Simon.
Simon, you are spot on to notice the emotional dislocation of the narrator. The fact that he is thinking about Rubik's Cubes when his partner is leaving does indeed show that. I did not intentionally set out to go as far as to suggest he has Asperger's, though rereading it after your comment, I can see how it could be read like that.
One of the great things about flash fiction is how much the reader can interpret the text beyond the boundaries of the words on the page.
Thanks for taking the time to give the piece such a thoughtful read and thoughtful comment.
The telling line was fit perfectly without the hard work. The disassociativeness could be directly related to not wanting to work at it all.
Quite the commentary on relationships (& I've never solved a rubik's ever--now I'll just take one apart!).
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