I have a tendency to fiddle old receipts into paper cranes— any scraps of paper really, that may fall at my fingertips. My notebooks are filled with train tickets or covers of pamphlets I found captivating, and my friends all push their coffee sleeves toward me after their last sips. Some say I'm a hyper-anxious rabbit collecting material for bedding. I say I'm presently nostalgic, proving the saying "one man's trash is another's treasure" true.

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Each piece below was inspired by the scraps they were written on, and a phrase or word from Google's  text fx, all from the same prompt: fold.

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As a writer it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge use of AI in this project. So here are my thoughts: AI is a tool, wield it as such. It is neither my heart nor my brain, thus I have not allowed it more than an RNG-esque role to supply phrases that spark my own prose. Google's text fx, I feel, was inherently built this way. You cannot prompt it with long words, nor give it a command. You simply supply one word (or three) and it spins that word in front of you with different filters which may or may not lead to a moment of: "huh that made me think of something!"

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It strikes the balance of process without entering your creativity. In fact, it very cleverly presents you a palette and watches as you paint.