“Action Origami” - Andrea Cohen
How much can you do with one piece of paper— creasing, tearing, adding volume with air? You can make a mythic sea monster toppling a tall ship in high, high seas, as my seatmate in 30C did in sixteen hours. He was from Saipan, an island advertised as a pearl arrived at by sea or air. This should have been a six- hour trip from Boston to San Francisco, but mostly we sat on the tarmac, iced in, waiting, as I did in a similar but different blizzard in ’83, on a People's Express flight from Logan to JFK. I was going to Park Ave to see a specialist in what I had. We called it homosexuality then, or my parents did, and my father was convinced it was his fault, on account of his queer cousin in Augusta, and his schizophrenic brother. I was going to the specialist for them, was going to die in the plane crash for them, and wouldn’t they feel like hell? Well, I didn’t die then, but learned to call all we didn’t comprehend gaps in understanding, becoming as those with fortune do, more of who I was. No one is more than one sheet thrown to the wind, folded and refolded, becoming what the person beside her might never believe possible. The man from Saipan has a window seat, he has clouds and a stack of boarding passes fastened with a rubber band, like an out-sized deck of playing cards, evidence of all the flights he’s taken this year. It’s the end of December. Flights are different from places. Places are different from people. In half a million miles, he’s seen mostly the inside of planes and terminals. He says, I like being in the air, without saying what happened on the ground, but it must have been something, don’t you think, something makes a man crave to be in transit, to swill chocolate milk and vodka from a paper cup, to count passage in hundreds of thousands of miles, to squeeze himself into a metal tube the way my grandparents, tumbling into each other at the department store where they worked, in Pittsburgh, in 1926, tucked love letters into pneumatic tubes from ladies’ hats to men’s attire. People ought to be love letters, we ought to get sent at Mach speeds to someone who, tenderly, will tear us open, will reread us constantly and continuously, and the man from Saipan hands me the sea and the ship and the sea monster ready to make everything veer off course, and I ask him to sign it, and he does, with xx, the way a man who can’t write does, or like one signaling, via shorthand— with love.
