Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse

Two valleys diagonal—this is where I usually start. Then some mountains, a petal, again, one in front, repeat behind. A bird emerges. You can make anything with the right number of mountains and valleys. I was nine when I first learned to make a dragon. New creatures birthed daily from my hands; I was given the gift of knowing it is possible to create anything.

Let me rephrase: create is not exactly the right word. Everything is already here, the dragons too. Origami is an art of rearrangement. You do not add pigment, you do not carve stone. Take nothing, give nothing, use what you are and become something new entirely. I remember looking in the mirror as a teen, seeing the corners of my body, and folding my penis between my legs wondering what it might look like to be a woman. Sometimes I start thinking about surgery, but I hold off; I tell myself, "no cuts, no glue."

I’m rearranging again, refolding old parts of myself, trying to look new. I hear things always look better on paper. It is the surface of dreams, prayers, plans, revolutions, wishes. On paper, everything goes right. Claude asked me if I had ever folded 1000 cranes before and I told her no, I get bored of folding the same thing over and over. Maybe naïve to think wishes come quickly, swept in a breath blowing birthday candle or in the snap of a wishbone. Some wishes are slow and difficult and deliberate and annoying and boring and repetitive and administrative and costs $388 and needs you to wait in line at the circuit court so that it can be properly stamped.

Everyone is trying to get their paper in order. After the election in November, the urgency for trans people to update their documents felt more dire than ever. Paper is the place of dreams, but paper also makes real. Thankfully, I had already changed my name a few years prior. I have paper to prove it now. I carry both of my names in my bag, one living, one dead, folded up, neat, twice-over—two valleys. My deadname tucked, all my paper creatures and 15 years of origami aspirations with it. These days, more people know me for flying than folding.

I'm less interested in dragons now. I just want to look at the valleys and the mountains. I’ve begun to see the entire world as a single plane. Everything is a rearrangement: animals are folded, objects are folded, architectures are folded. I lived at the Grand Canyon last fall and hiking to the bottom, peering at the oldest geologic strata, I saw the Earth itself folded.

We begin with the embryonic fold and end with the wrinkling of our bodies, folding the soul a few million times in between. We're told to prize the pristine and uncreased, but there is no other way to become a crane. We're predisposed to sit and watch as the world unfolds before us, but origami is a commitment to folding, organizing and reorganizing, even after all has seemingly come undone. Origamists call this pre-creasing, preparation before collapse. We lay careful lines, begin to fold our names and our lives and our world, creasing the horizon so that with careful hands, we can coax this reality into a shaping of our own.