Word

Green, yellow, and gray curved-edged boxes stacked in rows five wide and six high, started to appear on social media feeds about a month ago. That's when I took notice of them, anyway.

It looked like Tetris got tetanus. 

I had no idea what any of it meant, but I tried to ignore it anyway.

The world around me is so full of noise. The clamoring of all that's wrong within it and still, no hero galloping up from the horizon to save it.

Who needs another fad to figure out? Who has time for another thing to download, perhaps; to fiddle with, maybe even to fret over? It's just another distraction we don't have time to address.

But the silence around this puzzle eventually sucked me in. 

It brought me back to the 90s' and the last time I'd experienced the watercooler set trapped in silence. Back then it was the HBO series Sopranos that kept us all quiet. Owing to the fact that so few people subscribed we had to wait for that week's recorded episode to circulate through the office. It could be weeks before we could have any sort of post mortem.

This time, it didn't take long to figure out what no one was talking about.

Just a website that posts one game per day. Everyone who visits gets the same challenge. That's it.

The premise is simple enough: You enter a word and see how many letters are correctly placed, incorrectly placed, or not found in the word at all.

And what many people have found as they play along is that there is usually only four or five degrees of separation between the wrong answer and the right one.

Nobody's talking about it, because no one wants to burst the bubble that has formed around the word of the day. A word that has literally no connection to our larger predicament. A word that is so ordinary it shouldn't make us feel so magical when we solve it. But it does.

But we do. When the six squares turn green our hearts celebrate and we bask in a glistening, rainbow-colored soap bubble of happiness.

No one wants it to burst.

I don't understand how it works. I really know how I went from RANCH to MOURN to find WRUNG ... but it feels like it has to be prophetic. A miracle no more apparent than from DOLES to LAUGH to RURAL and finally ULTRA.

Which wasn't even a word that can stand on its own.

I don't want to quibble about it though. I'm afraid that the shine would tarnish in the harsh light of understanding. I don't want to see the truth behind the magic trick. I don't even want to tempt the fates with overexposure.

Perhaps this I why I never send my non-specific picture denoting my score to my friends and family on the World Wide Web, yet I seek out those who do to congratulate them.

It's the nod between us that acknowledges the shadowy particular we both recognize.

It is a simple, wholesome pleasure we all have in common.