XXXII. Origami Children.

The origami children are gone. Father does not know this yet, or knows it only as a feeling, a vague unease, the way you might notice a room has grown colder without understanding the window is open. He still speaks as if they exist somewhere, as if they might return if he waits long enough, if he says the right words, if he simply insists hard enough on their presence.

When he speaks of them this way, with that particular softness in his voice, that genuine tenderness—I almost believe him. Almost believe we were those delicate things he describes, all clean lines and careful folds, beautiful in our smallness, cherished in our silence.

Vivid in his mind, the origami children are still grateful for the pressure of his hands. Suffocating in their origami perfection, their flat hearts cannot beat.

The origami child folds away compliantly.

Brother is trying to become an origami child again. I watch him attempt it, this impossible resurrection. See him sitting across from father at the kitchen table, the overhead light making hard shadows of their faces, folding himself smaller, sharper, smaller, trying to remember the old creases, the mountain and valley patterns that once earned him the warmth in father’s voice.

Torn paper won’t crease the same way twice.

I can hear it in brother’s voice when he speaks: the separation of fibers, the thinning out, the loss of being. And father, confused by this imperfect replica, by this origami child who looks right but won’t hold the shape, responds the way he always has: with the steady pressure of correction.

Brother does not believe the origami children are gone. Hopes they might still exist somewhere, safer unfolded, breathing in rooms father cannot enter.

I’m not sure I believe it either. Some days I can still feel the creases.

Father mourns them. This much is true and uncomplicated. He loved them in the way you love a garden you’ve cultivated, a house you’ve built, a thing that reflects your skill back to you. His grief is genuine. He truly has lost something. Sometimes I catch him mid-sentence, reaching for a memory of how we used to be, and his hands open in the air like he’s forgotten what he meant to hold. The moment passes. He continues.

The origami children have become monstrous in their refusal to stay flat, in their insistence on taking up space, on existing beyond the pale plane of his design.

What he’s lost is the mirror. The small, folded testimonies to his ability to shape the world into something recognizable.

For what it’s worth,

-Charlene Iris

One thought at a time.

One truth at a time. 

Because some epiphanies stay with you.