Understory 2018

Paper People

Julia Murakami

I’ll take one order of disintegration, please. I don’t imagine myself ever yielding, folding up like a little origami figure, or pretending to feel like I’m not just paper. No, much more. Ornate elegance, bathed in the truths of our circumstances that give definition to this ten by ten. With a likeness to peace cranes reaching into a sky of paper hopes. Those notions are roped and tethered to blizzardous weather soaking that fiber heart in sideways rain. The daily grind will wind it up, stretching coiled filaments of an illuminated soul like the ligaments of a torn Achilles’ heel. Weakness defines the perishable like time. Beat the mortality by punching in paralyzed dreams, and breaking holes in the brick wall they say I’ve been born into, and falling out of line for how it has been laid onto a ground that may or may not be the greenest. Weightless sensations of a paper stomach and the impending doom of physics.

Falling is the best part because it exposes that there is somewhere else to go than straight into your paper face. Up is down and down is down and filling the arms of your sweater for the first time is all I can ever think about, and I guess that’s the truth of gravity, pretending I don’t care when I do and not wanting to fold, because when I do I’m out and folded. I won’t look right when I unfold and fold into something else, I’ll retain those paper scars from when I tried to be like you. When I listened to your chords, read your literature and remembered the shapes of your expressions. I’d rather be pulp than watch people watching me look like you.
Julia Murakami is pursuing Baccalaureates of English and Philosophy.

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