Unpaid Advertisement: Puzzle Glue
“HOW IS THAT puzzle on your ceiling?” a friend asked when he came over to watch reality TV.
“I put Velcro on the back, and that sticks to the ceiling because it’s carpeted,” I said, pointing at it. When I looked back toward my friend, his face was blank, so I said, “Do you mean how did I get the puzzle pieces to stick together to begin with?”
“Yeah, the whole—all of it. Start from the beginning.”
In the beginning, there was an ex-boyfriend. When we lived together, he did puzzles for hours on end while he played Grey’s Anatomy reruns in the background. It was his self-soothe; he’d done puzzles avidly as an anxious, overachieving teenager. I hadn’t touched one since probably grade school, and I don’t remember them being in our house even then. My maternal grandfather always had a big one spread out on a card table in his house, and he often worked on it while we were over, my relatives filling the dining room and living room, talking and yelling and laughing while he stood at his table in the back, slowly putting it together. Some of my cousins would wander over and help. I never did.
His perpetration is the fuzziest of mine. I was so little, and it was so short-lived.
My ex would do his puzzles on a little desk we had in the living area of our one-bedroom suburban Bay Area apartment, sunlight streaming onto him and into the room from the wall of windows onto our front balcony. A centuries-old oak tree towered over the property, gorgeous acorn woodpeckers chattering in the branches above us. It was magnificent. When he was absorbed in puzzles like that, he was more placid.
I purchased my first puzzle as an adult just days after I moved into Bessie. Before Bessie was even Bessie. I was driving around California trying to figure out where the fuck I was going to live/park/exist, let alone flourish, and I stopped at a grocery store I'd never been to in a town I’d never heard of and walked in to find, inexplicably, a display table stocked with beautiful puzzles.
Gabriel Mac
The one I picked up was a montage of Frida Kahlo art and history called “Viva la Vida.” When I lived in San Francisco, I went, once, to a Frida exposition at SFMOMA, and it. Was. Spectacular. I was familiar with the ubiquitous reprints of her work, but in person, they were an entirely different animal. So vibrant they seemed animated, somehow. Thinking of this and thinking of my calmed ex and looking at the bright pinks and blues of the puzzle, I wanted it. My new home was so aggressively cream-colored, neutral—bland.
The puzzle was twentysome dollars. I put it back down on the display. I walked around the store getting groceries and arguing with myself about whether I should get myself this puzzle. In the end, I did.
And: It IS really soothing to work on a puzzle! I laid it out on my ugly table made of cream-colored laminate and pieced little pieces of it together when I was taking breaks from writing about tough material. When I had to drive again, leaving a spot in an RV park outside Santa Cruz that I couldn’t afford long-term, I had to puzzle over what to do with my puzzle. The first time, I just left it where it was, thinking that maybe it would magically stay put. It did not. It slid off the table, and I had to start over. I learned to move big sections of it into the box it came in, but I always ended up having to redo some when I pulled them back out.
That’s the thing about big puzzles. You can’t put them together unless you stay in one place long enough.
WHEN I FINALLY finished my Frida puzzle, I was parked…I don’t even remember where. Somewhere in Washington? But I realized that in all the shuffle, I’d lost three pieces.
I’ll be honest that I had a meltdown about this. It wasn’t an easy puzzle to begin with, and I had put its 1,000 pieces together under not-easy circumstances. I tore my little house apart, searching for the missing chunk—the three pieces were contiguous—looking in every possible nook. In my head, I wrote a hundred drafts of furious letters to the puzzlemakers, in which I’d demand a refund, or for them to find those three specific pieces and send them to me. I’d looked everywhere.
It couldn’t be my fault. I couldn’t stand the self-loathing and self-recrimination that came with the possibility that it was my fault.
And I wanted to keep this puzzle, my first puzzle, to hang as art in my new, first home once I’d painted my walls. Simple googling revealed that there was indeed a product, simply called Puzzle Saver, made my Mod Podge and available at any Walmart for $4.17. But my puzzle, which I’d made and remade across several state lines, had a hole in it.
One night in bed, I had the inspiration to just pull more pieces out. Make missing-ness the point. My life, after all, was still being put together. There were still lots of gaps in it, in where it would end up. So one day, Puzzle Saver acquired from a Walmart in some state or other, I pulled more of it apart. I went extra-heavy pulling out its depictions of Diego Rivera, because fuck a dude who fucks your sister. And then I glued the rest together.
All you have to do is slide parchment paper underneath, dump glue on top, and spread it around. A couple layers of this, with 30 minutes of drying time between, will keep together even big puzzles—even puzzles you hang on your ceiling. I’ve since glued together a dozen puzzles and hung them up. Most are “complete.” One of them, I left unfinished on purpose. Some of them, not all the pieces were in the box to begin with. And sometimes, some got lost. In the case of the Frida puzzle, I did indeed lose the three missing pieces—I found them more than a year later, still interlocked, when I took apart my dinette benches to get to the plumbing underneath. Though there are lots of other pieces “missing” from that puzzle, those, I stuck back in.
Recently, I’ve gotten into wooden puzzles. The pieces are thicker and heavier; puzzle glue isn’t strong enough to connect them. The first wooden puzzle I completed I put together with Gorilla rubberized sealant, which I applied only to the back in case it dried funky on the picture (it’s the octopus-shaped one poking up behind Thomas in the first photo). My second wooden puzzle was an owl I finished just last week. I put some plain-old cheap shipping tape across the front, just to hold the pieces together while I flipped it over to apply the sealant; I intended to peel the tape off after it dried. But once I had the tape on, I realized it looked fine, looked shellac’d, almost. So I hung it up, with some Gorilla mounting putty, on one of my cabinets, just like that.
“PUT ALL THE pieces together!” a roommate of mine said, six years ago, when I was walking out of our Oakland house. I was heading to a hot springs up north, to help integrate a psychedelic journey I’d done recently. She was—the majority of us in that house were—very practiced in working with psychedelic medicines, and so knew that the integration of the material that came up was as important as—was more important than—the trip itself. I remember that she and I and another one of our roommates all laughed knowingly when she said it. It could be a real bitch, integration.
Sometimes a journey shows you or reminds you who you are, and it’s not at all compatible with the life you’re living or the relationships you’re in. When I started taking psychedelic medicine eight years ago, the very first trip ended by yelling at me, GET DIVORCED—YOU’RE GAY. (My husband at the time’s gender wasn’t the issue; mine is, as he identified as straight.) A lot of people’s journeys tell them to quit their jobs (mine did that, too) or give up all sorts of moneys or material attachments or people. And then their journeys end, and their egos and social conditionings take a look at those messages and say: No fucking thanks.
God knows I did, so many times. Today, I’ve been writing this with mushrooms in my system—I take them once a month now, a regular rebalance/reset. Realignment. Even today, even after all this time, they told me something I didn’t want to hear—to not fall back into a pattern I have a hard time staying out of and had started reconsidering, even after devoting the last seven years of my life to deconstructing my patterns. Anyone who looks at me for half a second can probably tell how committed I am to this work, to constantly reimagining and redefining the habits we all fall into because of limiting lies we’re told. But I was about to start limiting myself, again.
Over and over, I take my pieces apart. I put them back together. Repeat. The glue gets stronger over time.
Member discussion