For Lifelong Friendship: Cut and Paste

“What are you doing, throwing a personal parade in here?!”

My friend Kris stood in the doorway, surveying me—and the absolute mess of my room—in amused disbelief. A steady beat of music, thumping rhythmically through the walls of the bedroom, suddenly pierced through the open door behind him.

I looked up from a massive pile of paper scraps—the debris of snipped-apart construction paper, photographs, and plastic wrapping torn from a dozen brand new picture frames. I brushed a few pieces of paper from my hair as he laughed, walking toward me.

“I’m...working on—something—” I stammered, trying in vain to hide the giant mess with my thin body. I made an exaggerated shooing motion with my arms. “Go away! It’s a surprise.”

“Christine, we are graduating tomorrow,” Kris said emphatically over the music outside. His voice was a bit louder than usual, augmented, I was sure, by more than a few rum and Cokes. “Come ooonnnn! You can’t sit in here doing crafts all night. Be my beer pong partner.”

I stood up, placing my hands on his shoulders, and physically turned him back toward the door. I was determined to keep my project a surprise, if only for a few more hours. Kris started walking, if a bit wobbly, away from the heap of paper scraps and scissors.

“I promise I will come join you when I’m finished,” I reassured, guiding him out of the room. “I just need a little bit more time to wrap this all up.”

“Fine!” he said, exasperated, disappearing back into the void of music and excited voices just beyond my room.

As I closed the door gently, I turned back to the chaos of my project. My paper projects—in Kris’ words, my “crafts”—had always been messy. My trash can and vacuum filter were incessantly full of paper snippings, and even after a good cleaning, the tiniest pieces seemed to permeate the carpet—little bits gathering secretly under couch cushions, or in the corners behind my desk.

This project was no different. Every inch of floor space in my room—my college boyfriend’s room, really—the converted dining room of an old off-campus house, co-occupied by six other boys (and me, almost all the time), was covered in pieces of paper, mingled, too, with a smattering of glue sticks and scissors.

Since I was young, this paper-scrap-mess seemed, ironically, to be the best way I found to sort out complicated emotions. After a significant trip or family vacation, happy to be home but already missing the adventures left behind, I would make a scrapbook. When someone I cared about celebrated a birthday, I would spend hours perfecting a homemade card, choosing paper colors and patterns I thought they’d like best. When it came to expressing my creativity, my love, my feelings—paper had always been the perfect medium.

There was something meditative and calming about tracing the line of a photo carefully with a pair of sharp scissors. I relished the rush of satisfaction when I found the perfect combination of colors and patterns to make an ordinary image come to life. When I focused carefully on hand-cutting a series of shapes or letters, the uncertainty and worries of the outside world seemed to simply melt away. And as messy as everything got—as many pieces as I cut apart and scattered and rearranged again—they always came together into something new and beautiful, bonded by glue sticks and personal will.

Now, on the eve of college graduation, I turned to the solace of glue sticks and paper scraps once more. My friends—forged through luck and fate and the random connections that college brings, from all parts of the country, with different backgrounds and personalities and ambitions—were about to go our separate ways. Unsure how to deal with this new upheaval, my friends drank together, celebrating and clinging to the last few hours before graduation. Too soon, everything would change.

Instead of joining the festivities, I had printed dozens of photographs at the campus library, wrapped them in my arms on the half-mile walk back home, and sequestered myself in the bedroom, frantically snipping away far past midnight.

Turning to the dozen picture frames on the floor at my feet—one for each of the friends in our group—I smiled. Each frame was carefully arranged with its own collection of photos from the past four years: pictures from school events, late nights playing board games, and house parties. Trips to restaurants and parks and the zoo. Countless memories and inside jokes, captured in images that were understood only by us.

Kris—who had just barged in and insisted I join the party—had been the headstrong, de facto leader of our group since we first met during freshman orientation. Passionate about studying Egyptology and dedicated to getting a doctorate, Kris was heading to grad school in Memphis.

Brian, the boy-genius among us, always pitching new business ideas, had already started a full-time tech job at a local bank. Caylin, the athlete and diligent student, was heading to chiropractic school in Chicago. My boyfriend, Caleb, would be continuing school with a year of education licensure, while I started a job at a local nonprofit. Others would scatter across the country, starting careers and new opportunities. All of us, inseparable for four years, were headed to new, exciting futures. But those futures would force many of us apart.

Like my friends, the collections of photographs I carefully cut, arranged, and glued together were each their own individual piece of art. Every set of pictures told its own story. Every frame featured the images and moments I thought the person receiving it would treasure the most. Like our group, the individual frames were all stitched together into a collective story, none quite complete without all the others.

As the music and voices outside my door grew louder, I knew Kris wouldn’t have patience much longer. I smiled, pushing the scraps into a pile. I carefully stacked the frames, wrapping each neatly with a ribbon, and stepped out into the party beyond my door.

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“What are you doing, throwing a personal parade in here?!”

Nearly a decade later, many things have changed, and others not at all.

Caleb, who had shared that dining-room-converted bedroom in our college house, was now my husband. He looked down from the second-floor landing of our home, as I sat below him, surrounded by a pile of paper scraps, glue sticks, and scissors at our dining room table.

This time, my project was not a surprise— not for him, anyway.

“Oh wait,” he said a moment later, his face brightening as he walked down the stairs, still taking in the whirlwind of paper scraps that had engulfed our dining room. “Is this the book?”

I nodded, smiling. Instead of attempting to hide my work, this time, I thrust a page toward him proudly.

My latest project featured carefully hand-crafted paper cartoon animals, cut, arranged, and glued on the pages of a homemade children’s book. The book was a long-planned gift for the newest addition to our friend group, Kris and Caylin’s one-year-old daughter, Kailey.

The carefully cut-and-pasted pages featured all of our friends. This time, instead of in pieced-together photographs, laughing and holding beers, we were all depicted as animals—elephants and otters, badgers and hedgehogs.

Written by Caleb in a single sleepless night, the book featured each of us taking Kailey on a series of adventures. Within its pages, she rode bikes and read comic books and even built a playground. Along the way, our friends, each embodying an animal of their choice, shared special personal values with the little girl. She learned to be creative, brave, smart, and kind.

As I flipped through the pages, still not quite complete, I thought about how much our lives had changed since that night in the college house, just before graduation. No longer concerned about starting grad school or our first jobs, our friends were now embarking on new adventures—getting married, buying houses. Starting families.

Not everything had turned out like we expected. Many of us had already changed careers and relationships and future plans several times over. While some friends moved away to Florida and Minnesota and Idaho, they still remained just a phone call or video chat away. Kris and Caylin got married and found their way back to Caleb and me—living, in fact, just a few miles down the street.

Like then, I sometimes still fear that things will change too much. That all of us could lose touch, or become too different, too occupied with our own lives, to stay close. And after ten years, our lives have changed. Instead of separating us, though, the changes only bring us closer.

And when the pieces get messy, I can still dive into my pile of paper scraps. Embracing the chaos and doubt, I piece us all back together—with the help of glue sticks and a few pairs of scissors.