I Hear Them Laughing

Tonight I played Mancala by myself because I have no one else to play with. 

I still don’t understand Mancala. 

My wife and I played Mancala because she was half Filipino and I guess the game came from those South Pacific Asian cultures. 

I just stopped writing to look and I was totally incorrect so let’s pretend I crossed that out and never said it because even reading it back, even if it was correct, it sounds icky.

My wife and I played Mancala because she was half Filipino and I guess the game came from those South Pacific Asian cultures. 

My wife and I played Mancala because she grew up playing it with her grandmother and mother. 

I never learned the rules of the game, but I was told the rules that my wife played by (which I still don’t believe). Each side of the board had 6 cups. There were then 2 cups at each end. You filled each cup with an equal number of marbles. (we didn’t have all marbles. Our set had marbles, shells, buttons, garden rocks, etc.) Then you pick up one cup’s worth of marbles and drop them one by one around the board. If you landed in an empty one, you collected the marbles from across the way. If you ended in your big cup at the end of the board you got to start again. If you finished in the big cup of your opponent at their end of the board, you stopped. The winner was the first person to have their 6 cups empty. 

Apparently the game is from 2000BC. Apparently it is about seeds. Apparently I am no good at the game because I never win. Apparently I just get frustrated and bored because I have ADHD. Apparently I always just rushed to get the game over with so I could go back to doing whatever I was doing like playing with my phone or myself or zoning out or trying to initiate sex in some vulgar way because I didn’t realize that spending time together was the initiation. Apparently I never lived in the present. Apparently I will spend my life trying to build a time machine so that I could get these present moments back and I can, this time for sure, be present and happy to spend time with my wife to spend time with my family to spend time before time spends me. Apparently I am picking up dropping picking up dropping picking up dropping picking up dropping playing with myself. I look down at the wooden board that no longer lays flat because the hinges are a little old and rusted and I see that the side opposite me is empty and I have again lost.