A Paper Town for a Paper Girl

"Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I can’t stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”

Quentin and Margo were childhood playmates. After they found a body in the playground when they were nine, Margo started a mystery of her own. As the pair grew up, they were separated into different circles of friends: Margo became a member of teen loyalty, whereupon Quentin could only love her from afar. Consequently, when Margo invited Quentin on an adventure, he followed her without hesitating. However, what he had never imagined was that Margo then disappeared out of the blue and was nowhere to be found the day after their magnificent nightout. Despite his disappointment, Quentin surprisingly discovered that Margo had left clues for him to find her. Step by step, Quentin was led on another venture of finding his lifetime love and resolving the mysteries of Margo.

As the storyline untangles, I gradually understand how it is a fundamental but treacherous mistake we often make: assuming and believing a person is more than a person. As we encounter a stranger, we start to contemplate on what the story behind him is. Our opinions start blooming into blossoms of illusions that we mistake as the truth. However, the question is, what is the truth?

So Margo went searching for it. “A paper town for a paper girl.” She was confused about her life in a dreamscape and tired of being an idea that everybody liked, yet she could never truly be the idea to herself. “Paper town” was a place where paper creations became real, where a dot on the map became a real place, and “existed” more than the people who created the dot could ever have imagined. Hence, Margo thought the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real in a “paper town,” too.

In order to find out where Margo was, Quentin tried to piece together the scrambled splinters of who she might be, but the closer he got, the more distanced he was with the girl he once thought he knew. When he finally found her in a subdivision, she let him into her stories and he slowly unraveled her mysteries. Both of them let their guards down and lost hold of their “cracks.” Only through one’s cracks and into others through theirs can we genuinely see others’ true selves. Before that, we were only looking at the ideas of each other.

I was profoundly touched by the concept of “cracks.” Since I was always scared of my inner self being exposed, I wrapped my feelings in carefully polished words. When it came to pain and misery, I would often fake a smile and pretend to be strong. Yet, as I built high walls around my heart, I also sunk myself into the trap of loneliness and emptiness. As I ran away from the ones that once cared for me, I was also turning down the opportunities to be seen through my “cracks.”

Another metaphor I felt related to was the “strings.” When Margo found the dead body in the park, she said, “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.” We were all made of strings, which could be straight lines, simply connecting one to another; they could also be a ball of threads, intertwining people with mixed emotions and stressful tension. Still, the only way to find out where our strings might lead us to was to follow the way down along them.

After finishing reading, have I found what the truth is? No, I haven’t, and maybe I never will. It dawned on me there is no such truth behind anyone’s life. There are only stories. Regardless of what we are made of, the reason why we are who we are today is because of the stories and memories in our yesterdays. Everyone has the choice of how to tell these stories. In the end, no matter how our lives are reflected in others’ eyes, we are still ourselves. In the end of the stories of our lives, we are only human, mixed with emotions and endless mysteries; we are nothing more than a person.