Paper Boats

Paper boat makes me smile.

It has become part of my life. Has become part of the life of many children, indeed. When we were children, we usually fold a used piece of paper to make one and let it float inside a basin with water. Then we blow air to make it sail around its limited ocean until it soaks and slowly sinks and we could not make it move anymore. Again we build another one until we give up thrusting it with the air from our lungs.

So when rainy days came, I was so merry. Before the heavy downpour, I would tell Ayan, my playmate, and neighbor, to wait for my boat to sail past him. He would agree, displaying his yellowish and chipped front teeth. He had nothing to disagree with. The rainwater ran along the track that passed in front of our doorway to Ayan’s doorway.

Above the overcast heavens roared a deafening clamor and quickly stroke a shimmering sword. Afraid of them, I sprinted off to the corner of our house and cupped my ears as Mama shut the windows and the door off. I waited for the invisible giant in the sky to drain his heavy tears and to stop knocking on the sky floor.

Once I had been told the legend of a furious giant who lives in the sky. The giant knocks on the sky floor with his enormous hammer and swiftly pierces the clouds with his dazzling sword, because of his desperation to get back his lost princess, who is believed to have been hiding in the forests over the mountains ahead of the town.

The giant’s tears fell and soaked the forests and the soil that held them. In the middle of the outburst, I ran anxiously to my cabinet. I rummaged for used pieces of paper. I always chose test papers with low scores. I sprinted to the part near the door. By the time the giant’s fury had diminished, I folded the papers, one by one, until I could make as many paper boats as I could. When the giant calmed down, I immediately opened the door. I sat down on the sill, my feet on the bamboo steps.

Beneath the bamboo steps was a minor flood. It flowed through the worn-out-of-grasses way leading to Ayan’s house. Ayan was sitting on the three-step stairs of their house door. He hollered against the drizzle. “Set them out, Pou!”

I gently arranged the paper boats on the floor at my side. I had made seven. I held one of them. And I bent to reach the flood and readied the paper boat as I mentally counted up to five. I let the first boat go. It drifted away, along with the current, but I did not worry. Ayan was waiting for it, showing his chipped teeth, shouted in merriment, and raised his hands as if cheering a race.

As the paper boat was near him, Ayan prepared. He bent the way I did when I had sailed it. He blocked it in his little hand and snatched it up. He stared at me and smiled. And then he let the little deluge take the boat.

We sailed the other paper boats one at a time under the soft rain in a now half-muddy current. Some of them bumped over little mounds or tiny rocks and hit the grasses along the way, and so they overturned. As they reached Ayan, he would set them up again, ready for the last journey. When the last piece was about to sail, the raindrops had subsided. I was certain the diminishing rain couldn’t soak it. She was the last boat made from thick paper.

We knew where the paper boats would end up. Down the creek behind Ayan’s backyard. We thought some of them would wander for a time. Surely most would sink upon arriving at the creek. The water would soak their weak structure and the current beneath would easily pull them down.

Ayan could be one of my paper boats, drifted away for years because of his dream, went along with the current of life, and wandered around the city full of complicated ripples. One thing that makes him different from paper boats. He never sinks. He has reached his dream. He is now a successful marine engineer.

It makes me smile to think of what he’s now. Just like how a paper boat makes me smile.