How to Fold a Paper Crane
By Matthew Polson
Hello, welcome.
If you are eager to get this over with, then perhaps you are too eager. Understand that the goal here is to slow down. Meditate upon desire. Relax and enjoy the journey for the joy to be found therein. Understand that some clichés are cliché for a reason.
You are invited to regulate your breathing. Practice patience. Discipline, here, is key. With patience and discipline, you can get anything and everything your heart desires—with these, you can forget anything and everything your heart desires. With both, you may become who you are. You may learn some origami. You may find it fun. You may even find it calming.
Take a deep, full breath. Feel it stuff your lungs. Feel the wind in your hair, the air conditioning against your skin. The sun on your neck, perhaps. The overhead lights poking you in the eyes. Feel the pain in your stomach. Feel the twitch in your fingers.
Pick a struggle. You may conquer it—it is time to begin.
Find yourself a piece of paper. If dedicated origami paper is too hard to come by, any rectangular piece of paper will do. Recall this simple conversion trick: fold the top corner down to form a right triangle creased along its hypotenuse. Sharply crease the excess rectangular strip across the bottom leg of the triangle, moisten with your lips, and carefully tear. If this step was performed to completion, you may skip to step three.
Fold your paper in half, diagonally, to form a right triangle creased along its hypotenuse. Unfold. Rotate ninety degrees and repeat. You should now have a square piece of paper with two diagonal creases, a cross.
Recall the Japanese legend: If one folds one thousand paper cranes (senbazuru), a wish will be granted. Three steps down—thirty to go.
Flip the paper.
Fold in half, hamburger style. Hot dog style also works. The paper is square. Unfold, rotate ninety degrees and repeat.
Recall third grade. Remember the children’s historical novel Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, by Eleanor Coerr, in which a young girl (Sadako Sasaki) dies of bomb-induced leukemia. In an effort to complete senbazuru, she folds paper cranes until her death. In the novel, she does not reach her goal. In the novel, Sadako’s dear friends fold the rest and bury them alongside her in her casket.
Stay focused, here. Remember the patience your favorite teachers instilled. Calm your nervousness. Recall ten years old, dissecting a VCR with your father. Now, just as then, steady hands are the key. Imagine a square lawn, freshly manicured, straight mower lines. Let the creases guide steady fingers into collapsing the folds of your paper into the square base. Imagine an invisible fence coupled with shock collar. A game of Operation. Let yourself stray too far, here, and you’re in for a shock. The square base is an origami fundamental. Should you carry on the tradition, this will come in handy.
When someone shares something dear to them, you should listen. You now have a square base, the open flaps facing you. Fold the top layer into a kite shape, bringing the two points at the side into the center crease created in steps one through three. Grades one through three were a whirlwind. You were a whirlwind. Recall dextrous energy. Strong spatial awareness. Weaker social awareness. Remember your brother’s instructions on how best to not be annoying. You broke your right wrist at your sister’s tee-ball game. Apparently, it is not polite to make fun of people. Even when—especially when—they are older than you. Recall the aforementioned wrist as proof. A teaching moment. Fold the top corner down along the horizontal line of your kite. Now your work looks like the head of a king cobra. Unfold, returning to the square base.
Observe the creases. Recall a father’s tape deck that he took back from you. Imagine the four songs by Heart that your local classic rock station played every day, dubbed over a radio broadcast of your aunt’s high school basketball game from twenty years before your birth. The box set of the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS. Fast forward through the George Lucas interviews. Recall your father’s horror at the unraveling of The Empire Strikes Back, prompting a VCR dissection. Teaching moments revealed through emergency operations.
According to Sadako Sasaki’s real-life brother, Masahiro (who outlived her by scores), she did indeed exceed her goal before dying of leukemia. In his book (which he co-wrote with Sue DiCicco), The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki, he sets the record straight: the book states that she completed approximately one thousand four hundred fifty paper cranes prior to her death. Compare and contrast this sibling relationship to your own.
Apparently, nobody likes to be corrected. Even when—especially when—they are wrong. Redirect your energy. Correct yourself. It’s probably a good time to pick up a new hobby. As a child you doodled a lot. Engraved the paper to feel the energy leave your fingers. Lead thinner than 0.9 millimeters would snap, unable to bear the weight of frantic exertion. Recall time in the other room table to avoid the kitchen’s prying eyes. Imagine the sounds. Recall the enchantment of climbing trees, the terror of finding cicada shells in the branches. Husks of neither the living nor the dead. Remember your love and fear of exploring, isolation. Imagine bugs and snakes. Dogs. Coyotes. Quiet. Cow bones. The chilling soak of falling into the creek. The hideout shaded by ancient brambles. Mice. The whittled walking stick. Your thumb scar from whittling the stick. Your swinging vine. Adrenaline focus. The rusted cattle feeder. Neighboring horses. City rats. Noises. Expensive medicine. Pollen. Cats. Your father’s health insurance. An unsteady balance. Orthopedic bills.
Reach into the top layer of the square base’s open flaps. Let the creases guide you. Pull the bottom corner out and up to the top. Pivot on the cobra’s head. Follow closely. Your focus might be drifting. Do not let it. You will have to repeat this process nine hundred ninety-nine more times if you’d like to see it through.
A steady repetition, here, is key. Recall Daft Punk’s Homework. Flip your work. Repeat steps eight through twelve on the other side. Imagine LimeWire. The MacBook iTunes library—contrast with your mother’s. Imagine the Windows Media Player audio visualizer. Recall suggestions that you stop crying. Recall tears at your sister’s tee-ball game. Remember, you were pushed. Perhaps you deserved to be pushed. Remember, it’s not nice to make fun of people. You have now created the bird base.
This is supposed to be meditative. Let these thoughts flow through you, acknowledge them, let them pass. Are you still crying? Why? Recall post-dinner conversations at your father’s house. You can’t explain why you are crying. Imagine good intentions. Wine bottle labels mounted to the wall in beautiful patterns, the tasteful collage expanded every week or so that you returned. Recall mindless fidgets in class. Your third grade math teacher reading Sadako aloud and teaching the class to fold paper cranes. Imagine the fidget subsumed. Struggle conquered. It’s generally a good idea to keep a growing collection together. Complete your collection, you may be granted a wish. Reddit users say you should keep your cranes together, just to be safe, if you’re going all the way. Keep track. Clip them to your clothesline.
Remember, a steady repetition is key. Repeat step eight, replacing “square base” with “bird base” and “steps one through three” with “steps one through thirteen.” Pluck from the clothesline. Recall the pile of unfolded laundry that shared her bed some weeks. Recall burying yourself in that pile. Imagine the fresh smell. The pollen collected on the clothesline. Think of your own pile, your own bed. What was Sadako’s wish? Perhaps to pass the time. Her wish may then have indeed been granted, one thousand cranes or not. Pat your back. Yank your bootstraps. Keep folding.
Flip and repeat step fifteen. You now have a skinnier kite shape. Recall wide open fields in which you could fly a kite on a windy day. A birthday gift from your mother. A gift on the anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk. Recall trying to become a kite, duct-taping garbage bags under your long sleeves and tumbling down the hill at your grandparents’ house. Imagine a grandfather’s lung cancer. Never seeing him without the cool breeze of canned oxygen. He’d quit smoking decades before. And yet, recall the wheelchair. The wheezing boom of his beat-you-at-checkers laugh. Remember how the kite experiment didn’t quite work, but imagine how the garbage bag wings slow your fall at the top of your parabolic arc, just ever so slightly, and how for a single fleeting moment, you’re floating.
There is not a lot of outdoor space to explore in the city. Of the outdoor space there is, some is regarded as particularly unsafe. A long bike trail you’d like to ride is quietly scenic and beautiful, but be sure not to ride it at night— there was, apparently, a dead body found in those woods, albeit years and years ago. Not a cow skeleton. Not killed by coyotes. Remember that morals are flexible and not necessarily inherent.
There is, however, plenty of concrete. Shift your approach. Recall the calming balance of a skateboard, a bicycle. On wheels. Focus your energies, expel them through your feet. Repeat step eleven. Recall the last sentence of step sixteen. Prepare your discipline. The only way you will survive in this world remaining the way that you are and allowing yourself to be happy is with balanced, patient, and disciplined impulse.
Reverse fold the two prongs at the bottom of your skinnier kite shape. If you don’t know what this means, continue to step twenty. If you do know, do it. What are you waiting for? Reverse fold, repeat steps seventeen and eighteen. Skip to step twenty-three. Recall free-falling from a tree branch. Flat out of your back, feel the grass on your neck and ankles, your lungs shoved out. Imagine the cool breeze, canned oxygen. Compare and contrast with smoke.
You don’t know how to reverse fold. It shouldn’t be embarrassing to try something new—you will learn. But, ask yourself: how does it feel to be lesser? If you do know how to reverse fold, skip ahead. You’re wasting everyone’s time awaiting further instruction. You may take some initiative.
Perhaps you don’t like following directions. Well, you’re in pretty deep. If you’ve already reverse-folded, undo it. Do it like this: fold over the skinnier kite shape along the vertical center crease. Flip and repeat. Recall the newborn death of a brother which preceded you. How might that have affected your beginnings? Now, your work looks like the face of a small fox. Flip the bottom point (top flap) of the fox’s nose to the tips of its ears. Imagine hunting, killing, and eating a rabbit, or a city rat, or scrounging through a garbage can for your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Imagine a racoon.
How does it feel to know that you absolutely despise following instructions but you must read them anyway? Recall the LEGO system. You must be shown to do it correctly. Recall your mother’s tutorials for laundry, dishes, Windex, Formula 409. How does it feel to despise regulation—that the only way you yourself can find regulation is with internal instruction and sets and sets and sets of rules for how you must act and what you must think and what you are allowed to say? You are, however, allowed to make your own stupid decisions, of course. How does it feel to break those rules that are only put in place to help you? Good, hopefully. Flip and repeat.
The British elite hunt foxes for sport. You are neither British nor elite. You are unfocused. You’re less than ten steps away from completing this paper crane. Take a moment and recenter. Reflect on how far you’ve come. Recall the treehouse. Its arrested development. Due to divorce, you presume. The span of years between your father’s attempt, relinquished, the mantle taken up by your brother. Remember your presence. A rare time you saw him cry. Recall violent online Flash games you played. Imagine a mourning mother on the day of a grandfather’s death. Recall the one time you revisited the treehouse, just you and the sky and your father. Its resulting collapse. How might that have affected your beginnings? You are almost your own person now. Remember to keep going. Your development will not be hindered—you still need guidance to your final steps.
Fold along the centerline again, flip, repeat. Because you’ve cheated with your reverse fold you will have to fiddle a bit to make sure what you’ve done will still work. You can make it work. You’re adaptive. That is certainly a skill you have nourished. Confidence, here, is key. No one will suspect a thing as long as you are confident. Do not lose yourself—keep on.
Adjust the two prongs into the neck and tail of your bird. Let it take shape. Follow its guidance. Pick one of the prongs to be the head of your bird. Recall your third grade math teacher’s suggestion to pick the obviously less-perfect point. It’s not cheating, per say, just a shortcut to cover your fuck-ups. Reverse fold the head. The reverse fold really isn’t that difficult—if you still can’t figure it out, just look it up.’
For a less frail-looking bird, you should have skipped steps fourteen through sixteen. You are and have been allowed to make your own decisions. Recall a sister’s quiet solidarity.
You are not yourself responsible for others’ mistakes. Fold the wings of your bird down. This should be self-explanatory. If not, too bad. No one else will take responsibility for your own mistakes. Recall the required religious sacrament of confession. Imagine the sweet smoky smell of incense. Gold embroidery of liturgical robes. Byzantine modes. The significance of the number seven. The significance of the number three. Repeat step fourteen. Consider your own volition. Adjust the wings, head, and tail.
You have completed an origami crane. Toss it in the air. Perhaps it will fly.
Unfortunately, it undoubtedly will not. If you try it, you will notice, however: at the top of its parabolic arc, even if only for a fleeting moment, it will float. For merely an instant. Alas, gravity. Recall Toy Story on VHS. Recall—with style or not—falling. Camus’ definition of the absurd. Hoodwinked on DVR. The character of King Sisyphus. Imagine cartoonish violent roguelike video games. Let time pass.
Alright. Focus up. Repeat steps one through twenty-nine.
Repeat the previous step nine hundred ninety-eight more times.
You have now completed one thousand origami cranes in under thirty-three steps. Pat your back. Meditate on the meaning of joy. Recall this assignment’s undertaking. Have you kept your wish in mind? Do you remember what your heart desires? Perhaps you may have something your way now. Maybe. You’ve certainly tried hard enough.
More likely, you have forgotten. If so, then this exercise has at least provided you with a thousand little gifts you can give to people to show them how patient and disciplined and well-adjusted you are and how much time you have dedicated to meditative thinking and repetition and repetition and repetition and becoming and becoming and becoming the steady person you are today—you have a thousand unique paper cranes, and people are just charmed by origami. If you followed these instructions correctly, you’ll never have to buy a gift for anyone, ever again.
Matthew Polson grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Baltimore. They are a serial activity enthusiast who holds a degree in the Writing Seminars from the Johns Hopkins University, and, on most days, a lemonade with espresso.
