Cards Tahsin Bari

3 decks of cards, a few puddles of sweat, and a few hours of frustration later, I was finally done. I finally finished my house of cards. It was a simple structure, just made of the typical triangles, but I had to work for every single triangle I made. I never could have believed that some laminated pieces of paper would be a cause of humiliation, but that’s what happened. I was at a friend’s (or so I thought) house. We were just playing some card games inside because it was raining outside. Before we knew it, we’d gone through all the games we knew, so we were sitting around with nothing to do, until he had his “brilliant” idea (which was not at all brilliant). He suggested we have a competition to build a house of cards. I told him I’ve never done that before, but he insisted, telling me it was super easy.

That was a lie. I tried to put two cards together to make a roof shape the way he did, but I couldn’t. Those slippery cards just kept falling down on the table, and next thing I knew he had a huge house and all I had was a pile of cards. I could play Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for clarinet, I could run for miles and miles in the scorching heat of Texas, but I could not build a simple house of cards. If there was anything...