escort diary® of Jolie: Chess and the abscence of opponents
I have a chess board in my apartment that hasn't been used in weeks and it is starting to feel like a personal accusation.
It sits on the side table near the window, set up, ready, pieces in their opening positions with the quiet dignity of musicians waiting for a conductor who isn't coming.
Every time I walk past it I feel the specific guilt of someone who owns a gym membership they don't use, except worse, because the gym membership doesn't stare at you from across the room with thirty-two carved pieces that are clearly judging your social life.
I love chess.
I love it in the particular, slightly obsessive way that I love everything I love, not casually, not as a hobby I mention at dinner parties to sound interesting, but as a thing that has burrowed into my brain and rearranged some of the furniture and now lives there permanently, paying no rent, contributing nothing to my financial situation, and making me deeply happy in a way I cannot fully justify to anyone who doesn't play.
Here is what I love about it.
Chess is the only context in my life where I am allowed to be completely, purely strategic without anyone calling it a personality flaw. In every other domain: relationships, work, friendships, the delicate daily negotiation of being a woman in the world, strategy is something you're supposed to hide.
You're supposed to be natural.
Spontaneous.
Effortless.
The moment a woman is visibly calculating, she becomes threatening or cold or manipulative or whatever word people reach for when they encounter a female brain that is working at full capacity in their direction.
On the chess board, the calculation is the whole point. Nobody asks the queen to be less aggressive, nobody tells the knight it's being too much.
The entire game is an invitation to think as hard and as ruthlessly and as many moves ahead as you possibly can, and then to execute without apology. For someone whose brain runs strategy as a background process the way other people's brains run breathing, this is an indescribable relief.
And I love the silence of it. Not literal silence... I'll talk during a game, I'll laugh, I'll groan when I blunder, I'll make the specific face of a woman who just realised three moves too late that her bishop is lost and there is no one to blame but herself. But there is a quality of attention in a chess game that exists almost nowhere else. Two people, fully present, thinking about the same thing at the same time, from opposite sides. It is adversarial and intimate simultaneously.
You are trying to dismantle someone's position while also, necessarily, trying to understand it, to see what they see, to think how they think, to anticipate the move they haven't made yet by inhabiting their perspective deeply enough to predict it.
You cannot play chess well without being genuinely, deeply interested in how another person's mind works. And genuine, deep curiosity in how everyone's mind works is, as anyone who has read the rest of this diary already knows, more or less my entire personality.
What I want is simple: I want someone who plays well enough that I have to think. Not a grandmaster... I am not delusional about my level.
Just someone who plays with intention.
Someone who has an opening they like and a middle game they've thought about and an endgame that isn't just pushing pieces forward and hoping.
Someone who will sit across from me, in my apartment, with the warehouse light doing whatever it does at 4pm, and play a game that takes an hour and requires both of us to be fully present and ends with one of us saying I didn't see that and meaning it as a compliment.
I would make tea.
Or open wine, depending on the hour and the stakes.
Or go to the terrace of a café and sit in the sun, playing in between conversations.
The chess board is already set up.
It has been set up for weeks.
