By definition, Solitaire is a game of cards played by one person. It is solitary, something that can only be done by one individual. I sit on a green and grey striped couch watching him flip one card over and place it on top of another in complete concentration. He looks exhausted, it was after midnight after all, but once he has it in his mind to do something, he doesn’t give up very easily. I know he won’t stop until he wins.

“How exactly do you win this?” I say out of the blue.
He looks up, not realizing that I’ve been watching him all this time.
“Oh well, it’s really complicated, you wouldn’t care anyway.” He said, not intentionally being rude, it’s just how he thinks conversations work.
“Try me.” I said, my eyebrows raising at his response.
I get up off my couch and walk over to where he is laying sprawled out on the floor. He’s wearing blue pajama bottoms with polar bears spread out on them in an undetectable pattern. The dark blue of the fabric is great it contrast to his crystal clear blue eyes. He’s not wearing a shirt and so his tan torso hangs out casting a shadow on the cards. I lay down next to him not giving him a chance to say no.
“Ok, well let’s start over then.” He said picking up the cards that were already lying in vertical piles stretching out towards our bodies.
He hands me a pile and says “Here, shuffle these.”

I shuffle them back and forth a couple of times and then pass them back to him. He rifles through the shuffled pile and picks out an ace, a two, a three, and a 4. He then places these out in front of us in a horizontal row.

“Alright, well you start with these four cards and then you place the rest facedown next to them. You then flip one card over at a time and place them either on one of your four hold piles, or put them onto you ace, two, three, four piles if they work. You get it so far?” he asked me.
I was kind of distracted watching his movements and ended up in a daydream about the two of us, but I wasn’t going to let him know that.
“Yeah, I get it so far.” I said
“So the way the ace, two, three, four piles work is pretty simple. On the ace pile you go up by one each time so you would play an ace, then a two, then a three and so on. For the two pile, it would be two, four, six. Three, six, nine for the threes. Then the four would be four, eight, queen.” He explained.
“That’s pretty much it, it’s not that hard a game to get really, but you only win like one percent of the time. I’ve never won.” He told me.
I think I’m going to bed, he said and he started to get up.
“No, come on, let’s play one game.” I said, not wanting this one of our few pleasant exchanges to end.
“It’s called solitaire, both of us couldn’t play it anyway.” He said with a sheepish smirk. God I love his smirk.
“Yeah, but I could use the moral support. Come on please!” I said batting my eyelashes an obnoxiously large amount.
“Whatever.” He said, sitting back down next to me.

I laid the cards out as he had shown me and one by one started flipping them up. I played to both the hold piles and the numbered piles and everyone now and then would sneak a glance behind me to see how he thought I was doing. I got down to only having 7 cards left and I started to play one onto the hold pile when I heard a grunt from behind me. I looked back at him giving him a “how very subtle of you roll of my eyes” and then played the card on a different pile. I got down to three cards and then decided this was my chance to make him feel like he was doing something.

“Hey, what do you think I should do now.” I asked him.
He came closer to me and looked over my shoulder. I could feel his warm breath on my neck and I liked it.
“You could play that seven on the four.” He said.
I laughed to myself a little because I knew that was the wrong move.
“Hey buddy, this is the four pile.” I said.
“Yeah?” He said in a why are you telling me what I already know tone.
“I think you must be really tired, because four plus four does not equal seven.” I said giving him a playful smirk.
“Shut up.” He said, smiling widely and laughing a little bit himself.

I made the final play and won the game on my first try. He looked at me a little indignantly. I just picked up the cards and handed them to him, realizing I had just made him look like an idiot. He gave me a high five and then we both went back to our rooms to go to bed.

I think of this time a lot when I miss him. In fact when I really want to remember the friendship we had and lost I pick up a deck of cards and I start to play this form of solitaire, and you know it’s funny because when I do, I feel so much less alone.