I’ve reached the age where I’m like a woman engrossed in a chess match. This woman appears astute and alluringly contemplative. She’s bent and folded in her chair — legs angled inward at the knees, elbows propped on the table, crescent hands holding up her head. A body unnaturally posed in pleasing geometrics for the onlooker.

The woman rubs her temple with two poised fingers, a supercilious and deliberate gesture meant to be photographed for the newspaper.

To perceive in black and white would be simple and self-evident. Advance one pawn to take another. Move either forwards or diagonally. Will you marry me: yes or no? A near prophetic clarity ought to descend upon her senses as she studies the chessboard. Instead, she feels like the table is tilting and all her pieces are scrambling out of place.

Nothing is so dichotomous as a two-faced coin to be flipped in the air and land on a firm decision, just as nothing is certain to the woman. The game is too convoluted for her to grasp. These immeasurable possibilities and life-altering alternatives foist a gruesome headache upon her.

The woman is too paranoid of hollow promises and flawed gambits to be decisive. Everything ripe in her just-beginning life has been spoiled by her distrust. It’s her most unattractive, ineligible quality. She’s been worn thin by all her doubts, deliberately hides them beneath a cashmere turtleneck. Messiness dressed up in layers and lipstick will at least seem charming, she hopes.

The analog clock at the table’s edge counts down her move, and in this dank, oppressive gymnasium, she feels damp and pressed and monitored. Her mother is nowhere near. The woman is encircled by the note-taking press, the pensive arbiter, gentlemen reaching as far back as the walls. Dark English suits and educated stares. She spares no moment to consider what they might be keeping strangled beneath their neckties and button-ups.

The woman is a portrait of exhaustion disguised as focus. She’s no stranger to this heaviness and fatigue, even slight boredom at life’s interchangeable wooden pieces. The unbearable predictability feels like a quotidian commute to work; all that changes on the train is which congested car you ride, which stranger you face, whether you sit or stand. Occasionally the macabre thought slips in that if the powerlines cut or someone jumps onto the railway tracks, this perpetual state of vibrating dread would be disrupted. Quite rarely now is the woman disturbed, surprised. She desperately wants a player, a spectator, anyone to wail, to discharge a pistol, so that the guttural sound may reverberate around this hushed room and strike her soul.

One of the tournament volunteers outstretches her hand, offering a lit cigarette to make the experience more tolerable, but the woman doesn’t smoke — instead she suffers sober and a bit starved.

I use this woman to dress up my tribulations. I’m no chess master and when I pick up the knight by its horse head, I simultaneously regret every other piece I could have moved but didn’t, and the time it takes for me to settle on a checkered square is lumbering and cumbersome. I’m wading through viscous mud. I’m condemned to ennui. And my opponent, like life’s opponent, is some unplaceable man. There will always be a man. Brighter, better, more pompous and self-righteous, entitled to your career, your shopping cart, your taxicab at the airport terminal.

The longest recorded chess match was two hundred and sixty-nine moves, over twenty hours. Mine has drawn on for three fraught years now, and it still persists.

My mother used to play these matches, in this boys’ club, as did our foremothers, until I finally claimed the seat. The onlookers, the arbiter, the press — each of them passed down their tickets too, ensuring the gymnasium teemed with posterity. It will be the same batch of us, huddled and judgmental, until we grow old and our faces become as unsightly as what we’ve thereto kept hidden within.

When I finish one game, my prize is to be ushered to another table, and then another, enclosed in a simultaneous exhibition; a gasp and an applause; I gallop round and round plastic folding chairs and cigarette smoke and camera flashes—someone spins, dips, and kisses me—and I’m back at the chessboard.