Main Street Magazine Spring '23

The played cards must either be equal to or of higher value than the one on
the top of the pile.
To start the game, the top card from the remainder of the deck is flipped
over.
If you do not have a playable card, you must take the top card from the
adjacent face down deck. If the card is playable, play it. If not, you must pick
up the entire face up stack and add it to your hand.
You must always have at least three cards in your hand. At the end of each
turn, you must draw cards from the face down pile until you are holding three
again.
Some cards are special. Some cards can be played on top of any card,
regardless of the value: A two, five, and ten.
A two can be played on top of any card, and any card can be played on top of
a two. It acts as a kind of “reset”.
During each fall semester of college, my first trip home is during the
second weekend of October. Always encompassing the kind of autumn that
remembered when the winters are too cold and the summers are too hot — it
calls to a version of me who lived long ago. I can see the ghost of her, carried
along on the nostalgia-scented breeze. She dances in the leaves that swirl in
the air, light as a feather, yet to take on the weight of growing up.
Rural Massachusetts is best during this time, and the arrival home feels like
a pause on my adulthood. Hand in hand with the ghost girl, I can exist in the
home I’ve always known in the way I used to: with the feeling that life exists
in a bubble of colored leaf piles, warm apple cider, and walks through the
woods.
During the early October weekend, we are a double vision of tangled blonde
hair and dirty sneakers in the midst of a season and age that is everchanging,
this weekend serves as a reminder that home will always exist and
so will all the versions of me who have lived there.
A kind of reset.
A pause, a deep breath.
A five reverses the order of things, but only for the one turn that comes after.
Once a five is played, the next player must play a card that is a lesser number
— a two, three, or four.
Across the lawn, the flicker of firelight was the only illuminator in the dark.
From my car parked on the edge of the street, I could just make out the
silhouettes gathered close around the light. They huddled close to the
burning embers, hoping that if they pack close enough together, they could
block out the cold air that pinched their cheeks. Clad in flimsy Halloween
costumes, their distorted shadows danced on the house behind them,
sprouting wings and horns and tails — a parallel seance.
Eye trained on the fire, I blindly felt my way across the yard towards the
group, shaking off the cold that began to tease me, too. As the tightly closed
circle cracked open to digest me, I pulled at the bottom of my sweatshirt
and the light from the fire danced on the paper cut outs of college logos that
were safety-pinned to the fabric. “I dressed up as college because college is
scary,” I told the firelit faces who had welcomed me.
A ten burns itself and the entire pile beneath it. Then, you get to go again and
can play any card you want.
Though a burn is the end of the pile, it’s also the start of a new one.
Graduation looms like a storm, the dark clouds distant on the horizon and
drawing closer with each day that passes. Though the warmer days bring the
sweet promise of summer, they also carry the inevitable end of a season that I
don’t feel ready to leave behind.
The storm will bring change, with wind and rain tearing through what stands
and leaving very little in its wake. However, with the destruction comes an
opportunity to rebuild, and what is strong enough to weather the storm will
serve as a foundation for what’s to come next.
Marking both an end and a beginning.
It takes some time to
understand.
Once you’ve used the entirety of the face down deck, you must play your hand
in order to play the cards on the table.
You must play all three of your face up cards before you can use the cards
that were placed face down.
Once you have access to these face down cards, you must choose them at
random when your turn comes. Sometimes, they work out. Sometimes, you
must pick up the remaining deck and play all the cards again in order to get
back to your face down cards.
A life-altering choice often feels like guess work. With no way of knowing what
the future will look like, I make choices with fingers crossed and the desperate
hope that things will work out, because they have to, right?
“Don’t remind me,” I tell my roommates when we remember that we must
leave our apartment for good in a few short weeks. The nights left eating
takeout on the couch while talking over the TV feel more important than ever
since I know the card must be put down soon.
“I wish we met sooner,” I tell new friends who I’ve only grown close to in the
last few months. It feels like an unlucky deal to be given these cards so close
to my imminent departure, because to move ahead in the game, the cards
must be played.
As you play the game, you put down cards with fond memories and pick up
new ones with fingers crossed that they’ll be just as good.
Never out of moves.
This is shithead.
This is life.
Do you understand?
Moving to UNH and away from my status quo felt like a disturbance in the
natural order of things, like a long-standing tree ripped from the ground or a
boulder dropped into a still pond. I felt as though I was stuck on the monkey
bars on the playground, knees locked around the bar, hair brushing the wood
chips, the blood rushing to my head as I hung upside down, unable to flip
myself back over to land on my feet.
Over time, I adjusted to the shift in perspective, regrowing roots and calming
the rippling water. As I settled into a new life that became habitual, the
upside-down dissipated and only existed for a short time. For just a single
turn.
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