She hands me the origami when she ’ s finished , a little cube that bulges when I blow air into it and deflates when I gently apply pressure to the sides . There ’ s a little smiley face drawn on the side . I push on it a little , and as the air whooshes out it crumples into a frown .
I pick the sketchbook up and turn it over in my hands . The cover is blank , but there ’ s an handwritten inscription on the back : What ’ s good for the art is bad for the heart .
She tells me her name is Chen An . 3 .
“ Fancy meeting you here .” Chen An slips up to me when I ’ m in line for the bus and drops her meagre belongings into the plastic shopping bag I ’ m using as luggage : a comb . Her notebook , with a few pieces of multicolored paper sandwiched in between . A spare set of clothes .
“ Looks like we both won the lottery for the Western Dream .” I say .
Her hair is up in a bun this time , held in place by a pencil that ’ s threatening to slip out every time she nods her head . She laughs . “ It ’ s only getting better from here , baby .”
We sit next to each other on the plane . Chen An suddenly grabs my hand as we take off- I glance at her . “ I didn ’ t peg you for an anxious flyer .”
“ Oh , it ’ s not the flying I ’ m afraid of .” Paper napkin scraps float gently to the ground as she sweeps them off her lap .
“ Just think about it- soon you ’ ll be able to fold as much origami as you want .”
She sighs , sinking back into a seat that smells faintly of orange juice . “ Then how will I decide what I want to fold ?”
I flip my writing notebook open as Chen An pretends to be asleep and we cut through the night sky . A light flickers on the wing of the plane .
My pen hovers over the blank page for a second as I stare helplessly at it , caught up in the immense responsibility of being able to write anything I feel like . The knowledge of my own freedom looms above me , closing in ever menacingly , as I leave my former life and my family , trapped forever under the rubble of war , behind .
I jerk my hand backwards from the paper , but the pen is a dollar-store cheap thing that leaks , and a globule of ink spurts from the tip even as I slam the notebook shut . It leaves a black-blue stain on the leather cover and covers up part of the sentence written on the front .
It used to be a quote from Ernest Hemingway , but now it just says “ Bleed ”.
The ink seeps past the cover , all the way into the pages inside . It stains an accusation into my fingers , sharp against the ink stamp on my wrist that was just beginning to fade away .
4 .
I settle into a dimly lit single room in a fluorescent metropolitan city , in a block where , it seems , all the refugees have congregated . I talk to people in my language and eat food I thought I ’ d never taste again . Chen An lives half an hour of traffic away .