Folding for Leon

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Eight. Nine.

And ten. 

Sarah laid out the origami stars on the cream-colored table top in one line, equal distance apart. The paper strips were galaxy-themed. Leon’s favorite. The stars, the size of Sarah’s thumbnail, glistened in different shades of blue, from dawn to dusk. 

Sarah scooped them up and placed them in a mason jar with a hinged glass lid. She picked out the jar because she liked how unobstructed it was. There was no metal lid. No embossing on the body. It was completely see-through from all angles. But they only came in a pack of four. Sarah did not hesitate to pay extra. “Even better.” She told herself. “To have some options.” Out of four jars of various sizes, she chose the second to the left. 

A jar that would look perfect on Leon’s desk and fit one thousand origami lucky stars. The stars depicted stars because Leon was geeky. The stars boasted blue because Leon loved blue. Leon wore the color obsessively. To the degree of suspicion. To the degree of…

On the spectrum. 

If not, why would the 38-year-old Leon make Sarah fold? 

“But he didn’t make me.” Sarah blew her nose. “I wanted to.”

On one of their earlier dates at a Korean restaurant, Sarah folded the chopstick wrapper into a lucky star. "I used to do that when I was a kid!" Leon exclaimed. Since then, Leon would send her videos about origami. And to surprise him, Sarah would buy all the craft materials she had never cared for even when she was a kid, recreate the same origami, be it a dinosaur or a dodecahedron, and bring it to their next date. "Wow, it is AMAZING!" Leon would exclaim again. The sparks in his eyes reminded her of their early dates, when she made up stories about restaurant wall art, and Leon told her how much he loved listening to her imagining. It planted a seed in Sarah, to see that spark more, in eyes that had since become mostly indifferent. Sarah wondered how her eyes appeared to Leon. Did it show at least her determination to love him, and to give him the tenderness he seemed uncomfortable receiving? Hey! I like kiddie stuff too. With you. Yet for Leon, folding seemed to be mostly solitude. It started to get difficult for Sarah to watch. You could be part of nerdiness, but it was close to torture when you were the sole audience, however much you cherished the geeky child in his heart. 

So Sarah kept on folding. Maybe one day, she would understand the secret language of folding. The pathway to Leon's heart. Even when her therapist said that he was manipulative and when Leon told her that all her interest in origami seemed ingenuine and forced, Sarah only folded more.

Sarah made a knot with one end of the paper strip, and a pentagon appeared. She tugged the shorter end into an opening and began wrapping the long end, following the edges of the pentagon. When it reached the opposite edge, Sarah folded. So the end of the strip circled the base like a comet, thickening it layer after layer. The long end soon became a short stubbie, then into a pocket it went. It was now just a pentagon. Clean and clear. No limbs sticking out. 

Sarah had been crying since Leon called. It was the first time Leon had ever called Sarah. He received a phone call from his ex after years of no contact. She wanted him to remove her name from a garage they rented while dating. Leon kept saying, “You know, right?” like Sarah was an insider. Sarah was an involuntary insider because Leon talked about his ex excessively. But Sarah was not jealous. It was not an envy-worthy relationship, and Leon was not a good storyteller. A good storyteller did not reveal his agenda that easily, and his was to invoke a reaction. So Sarah never cared. Even when Leon flaunted her ex as the sole benefactor to his multi-million life insurance, Sarah only shrugged. 

I only wanted you alive. 

But she heard the anguish in Leon’s voice. Leon had a high pitch for a man, in a neutral way. But on the phone, he sounded higher. Emotions contorted his vocal cords. His voice almost trembled and risked breaking. He managed not to lose himself, and on the other side of the line, Sarah tried to achieve the same. She didn’t know where the story was going, but she could see a lump rising in her chest and permeating her throat and nostrils. Sentiments flowed like a river on the verge of flooding. She felt his pain.

“So you know how hard I tried not to reach out to her after we broke up, right? And I thought I had completely moved on.” He continued, “So I told her to leave me alone and hang up.”

Sarah nodded like Leo could see her, engaged in his story, in tears. 

“But it just reminded me how much time we had spent together,” Leon continued, “And how much I love her.”

Did he mean “loved”?

“I never felt the same with you. And I don’t think I ever will.” There he said it, “I don’t want to drag you along.”

Once again, Sarah lost to his ex. Just like her therapist predicted, for an avoidant like him, the past always trumped the present. You only got to look up to the pedestal where he placed his ex, who would always be better than you. Even though she was once treated poorly too. 

Sarah’s sadness was interrupted. She was not only an insider but a participant now. She was not ready to feel bad for herself yet. It was not the first time they threatened a breakup or did. Soon, they would rekindle. Sometimes within the same day. The first time he said he loved her was after the first time she broke up with him. So now he wanted to end it because he couldn’t imagine loving her? Liar. But Sarah did not want to argue about the breakup or initiate any push and pull they always did. Not yet, at least. She just wanted to be enveloped by sadness together with him, a shared sadness.   

Sarah turned up the music. Lyrics of love songs made sense now. She drowned in the heart-wrenching chorus and kept folding while her nose dripped. She held the pentagon star with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, and with the same fingers of the right hand, she pinched in the points one by one and puffed up the star. There it was, a finished product. Sarah put it on the table, the first of another dozen. 

Sarah continued to fold. Then, about the fifth time her Spotify playlist repeated itself, melodies and feelings started to fall flat. Reality resurfaced.

Leon was not the usual kind for Sarah, who had a low tolerance for femininity in men. But Sarah decided to be open-minded, just like her response when Leon asked her to describe herself in one word and then said he was the same. Sarah was glad she did. Because the soft boy was nothing but soft, and no amount of masculinity could have made Sarah feel more desired than the sparks in Leon's eyes. When he smiled. When his eyes got misty with glitters. When his eyes smiled with light too. Those transitory moments, a fraction of their time together, were all Sarah thought she needed to keep it going. 

And he said, “Maybe you should remove your ovaries. Then you won’t be so emotional all the time.”

It took a lot of folding and emoting and an offense to a whole gender to put the questions in Sarah’s face, right and center:

Was it possible that the spark was not for her, but just a super late bloomer who discovered that he could be misogynistic too? 

And that he took the power of her love to love himself more, never tried to open his mind, and believed the ones good enough for him shouldn’t try either? 

The bellies of Sarah’s thumbs and forefingers swelled up in red. The hand that was holding hurt more than the hand pinching. Sarah despised the questions more than the breakup. She still loved Leon. But she thought she should stop folding. Out of the ten decks of strips, two remained. Sarah had folded roughly 800 stars. She emptied the jar and restocked it by color; the darkest blue went to the bottom. The jar now looked like what a rainbow would look like in outer space, a piece of art.  

Sarah put the jar in a gift bag and left her apartment. She walked down three flights of stairs, exited the building, turned left, put the bag in the garbage, and went back up.