[sept 20, 2007]
[your heart is an empty room]

One Hand Short

This is not your first time recalling this particular game. You've tried it several times before, and yet could never quite manage to let it settle in your mind, a finished page of kifu. It isn't that you couldn't memorize it; it's always so close to the surface of your consciousness that bits of it seep into your other games, at random moments. (Perhaps you are just that distracted.) You could recite it with digits only, or with the numbers and letters reversed and switched to opposite sides.

But you can't recite it backwards. The game isn't finished.

This is not your first time replaying it, either. On those nights that last so long, during those painful periods of time between dreams (which grow longer and longer, you notice, your heart beginning to race), you abandon the rest of your Go study to try it again, to remember. You lay every stone correctly, trying not to slow as more memories of *that day* surface with each move, and then you remember the movements of his fan.

You even learn more and more about each move with each night you try this. You remember that you were sleepy, and then discover that he was not trying to wake you with his play. He moved forward when it was disadvantageous; he defended in places that seem odd. It is like he was speaking to you, spelling something for you, with no hopes to make it into endgame: confusion, desperation, resignation.

A kind of sadness. Maybe hope.

Once you have reached your last move, you have forgotten that nothing comes after. He had felt, after all, close enough to touch. Sometimes you look around and find the emptiness of the room surprising. Always you leave the game on the board, pristine, so that somehow he will see that the next move is his.