I wrote this when Landon was in about first grade. It is only my point of view. I can’t say how much it reflects his reality. He doesn’t like to think or talk about how he was when he was younger, so I don’t know what it was really like for him. This is what it seemed like to me.

Once upon a time there was a little boy. He wasn’t very big and most people hardly noticed him, but he had a lot of bigness inside. All that bigness hurt, but he didn’t know how to let it out. Sometimes when he was playing a game he could forget about it. The bigness would get too busy to bother him, so he spent a lot of time at the computer. He lost himself in computer games.

Once he started to draw. He wrote a word and covered it with little spirals. Cinnamon rolls all around the word. Then he put spirals around the spirals until the page was full. Maybe if he could draw enough circles, the bigness would get lost, but it didn’t go away. So he drew mazes for it. He drew big and little mazes. He made mazes out of every piece of paper he could find. Some had three or four entrances. Some had loops and loops and fantastic beautiful designs. Some were very, very small. He filled notebooks with mazes. And on every one he wrote IN and OUT. But the bigness found its way through every maze, even the ones that were impossible, and some days the little boy thought he would explode.

He started folding origami. He found some books and learned to follow the pictures. He made deer and camels and pigs and butterflies. He made fortune tellers and sampans and hats and boats and wild fantastic shapes that fit together. He made offerings and spiders and lobsters and hearts and flowers and cranes and nesting birds. He invented beautiful, intricate symmetrical shapes without names. He took paper with him everywhere and folded everything. He folded handkerchiefs and napkins and money, gift wrap and homework and newspaper. It was as if he had to keep folding to keep the bigness inside from defeating him. He filled his room with folded paper figures. He hung them from his ceiling. They were everywhere all over the house, stuffed in pockets or drawers, under the couch. No matter how many his mom threw away or put in boxes to keep, the next day there were more and more.

Sometimes she cleaned his room. Throwing almost everything out, stacking papers neatly with scissors and tape and keeping some of the neater and more unusual shapes. But before long the paper creatures had covered the room again. He slept with them all night and they went everywhere with him. But the bigness is still there inside this strong little boy.

He can see how the world should be, he just can’t see why it’s not. He can understand a lot of things, but he can’t understand his own BIG, BIG feelings. They take him over sometimes and no one is there to help him.

As long as he is folding, he is making a different world for himself. It doesn’t matter what happens to these creations, it’s the folding that is important. As long as the paper doesn’t run out, there will always be another shape to coax out of its flatness and there will be a reason to pick up
one

more

piece

of

paper.