How To Fold

Disclaimer:

A lot of people find it hard to fold this model because the end result can be rather unpredictable.

Step 1:

Take a square piece of paper and fold it in half, diagonally, both ways. The possibilities of what you could make from here are endless, as this is a basic step—almost everyone can do this. It’s like a baby learning how to crawl, the way you did at 10 months old in the window display of a GAP store at some outlet mall in California. 

Step 2:

Flip the paper over and horizontally fold it in half. Again, this should be like a baby learning to talk—it’s a foundational step that’s required for the model. Of course, some haven’t started talking at this age, but that’s fine, you’re not one of them. In fact, you were early—you started speaking when you were two and a half; your first word was ‘dada’.

Step 3:

Fold the paper in half again, but vertically. This should be like going into pre-school, where you’re surrounded by kids your age. On your first day there you find it loud, unbearably loud, so when your mother picks you up from school you burst into tears, the ugly kind. you tell her you never want to go back and she patiently explains the concept of friends to you. you think over it and decide it doesn’t sound too bad, so you reluctantly agree to go back to school the next day. You overheard two girls talking about how cool birds are so you lie and say, “I actually own a bird!” 

The lie tastes like dust in your throat, but one of the girls, the one on the right, turns and looks at you and says, “Cool! Wanna eat with us?” 

Elated, you nod, the words making your lie a little more bearable. 

Step 4:

Flip the piece of paper over and fold a square base. This step is rather satisfying—watching your previous folds collapse into something so simple, like a square, brings an odd sense of joy, like realizing how far your relationship has progressed with your friend. You two have been friends for a year now, and you frequently have playdates where the two of you spend the whole day playing together. Your mothers love to take photos of the two of you and life is good. You are four, you are carefree, and you are happy.  

Step 5:

Valley-fold the left and right sides and repeat on the other side. This step serves as set-up for the next step—like how going to kindergarten is preparation for grade school. You and her aren’t placed in the same class but somehow you become closer. The two of you seek each other out at recess and still have playdates after school, where the two of you play tag and hide-and-seek at her house. 

Step 6:

Reverse fold both sides to get a diamond—more specifically, a rhombus. You learn about rhombuses in first grade, where your teacher gives you a lollipop for knowing that a rhombus is, in fact, called a rhombus. You tell your friend about this and her eyes glint with some sort of weird emotion before she asks if you can give her a piece of candy from your teacher’s candy bowl. 

But your teacher doesn’t give out any more candy that week, so one day during recess, when everyone is outside, you stay back and swipe a roll of mentos from the candy bowl. Your teacher catches you because you were holding it in your hand with your fist balled up, so when she asks you to open your hand at the end of the day, she sees the somewhat soggy candy. Strangely enough, she doesn’t say anything. All she does is purse her lips and nod, and there is a strange, sinking feeling in your gut, but you are too young to know what guilt feels like, so later that day, when you go to your friend’s house and she excitedly thanks you for the candy, you can’t help but smile. 

Step 7:

Fold the edges in on both sides to get an oblong hexagonal shape, and try to get the folded points to align with each other in the center. This is a small detail, but it’ll help the end result look better. You find that by doing little things for your friend—holding the door open, letting her choose what to eat when you have playdates—the more she likes you, and the closer you two get. But you don’t mind doing these things, because the two of you have so much fun together. To your seven-year-old self, it’s more than worth it. 

Step 8:

Flip the model over and repeat on the other side. Third grade is basically a repeat of last year in terms of your friendship, except the two of you and your families go on a trip together for the first time. The two of you spend a couple days at Disney (you even have adjacent hotel rooms), and her family introduces  you to their other family friends, and you think you are finally living in an actual Disney movie, where the main character has a bunch of friends and little-to-no conflict.

Except, of course, you realize soon enough that the main character is not you but, in fact, your friend. You also find that when around other people, she talks to you less, and so begins the cycle of self-doubt. Did you do something wrong? Does she not enjoy your company anymore? 

You’ve been an overthinker since you were young—so naturally, it would make sense that the reason your friend won’t talk to you as much in the presence of other people is your fault. You probably aren’t cool enough, so you decide right then and there that you will change if it means the two of you can keep being the way you’ve been until now. 

Steps 9-13:

Reverse fold the left and right sides, slowly pull the wings open, and adjust the head. These are small steps, really, that just make the model look more realistic. Individually, these steps are inconsequential, but put together, they change the origami model quite a bit. 

The next few years are spent studying the people your friend hangs out with apart from you, as well as your friend herself, and trying to make yourself more like them. It feels like you are an impostor, a skinshifter, if you will, but this process of changing your personality yields somewhat positive results—she does talk to you more around her other friends, but around certain people, it feels as if you are a ghost, but that’s fine. You’re not quite up to her standard yet, but you will be. 

Step 14: 

The crane is complete. Of course, this model doesn’t resemble an actual, living, breathing crane, no, that would be madness—just like how you’re not actually the person you present yourself as. Some parts of you are off, like the fact that you can’t stand having to wear dresses, yet she and her other friends wear them all the time, so when you all hang out, you stick out like a sore thumb. You can say all the right things, you know when to laugh and when not to laugh, but this carefully constructed personality of yours, made over the years, still isn’t enough for your friend, and you feel lost. 

Then one night, when you can’t sleep, a thought appears in your mind and it is so jarring, so frightening, that you immediately dismiss it, but it lingers in the back of your mind for the rest of the year, biding its time, waiting for the day when you decide to stop being in denial.  

Step 15:

Crumple everything into a ball. Yes, a ball. Doing this will be painful, just like when you realized you two were just too different. All this time you were still trying to contort your personality to fit hers, trying to hold out hope that maybe whatever friendship you had when you were kids was still there, but you realize nothing you do will ever be enough to turn back time. You can fold yourself into a crane, but to her, something about you will always be lacking—you are too loud, too clumsy, too headstrong to actually be a crane. This realization is painful, because you’ve wasted the past few years trying to fix a lost cause.

Step 16:

Unfold the ball and smooth out the paper. Start over. It’s hard, with past folds interfering with new ones as you try to branch out and make new friends—you were always shy—but you do. You meet someone in one of your classes, and then you meet other people in other classes—people who you feel you can be yourself around. It’s an odd feeling, something you assume is akin to moving somewhere new after being in one place for such a long time. 

You feel an odd sense of nostalgia, one that always accompanies a loss of familiarity, but as Atticus said: “Nostalgia is a beautiful lie dressed up in sepia.”