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Jessica Chen has always been a natural. She was born the best, while I’ve spent my entire life trying to just be good, and I’ve failed at even that.
It’s cruel, really, how the world tends to present its most beautiful parts to you when you’re so profoundly sad.
“Congratulations, Cathy,” I tell her, surprised by how smoothly the words flow from my lips, how genuine my smile feels. It’s so easy to be generous when you lack nothing. To be nice when you’re not in pain. It doesn’t matter if people are cheering for someone else, because they’re already cheering for me.
“You’re just in this competition for the glory, aren’t you?” “Well, yeah,” I replied, the medal now clutched to my chest. I loved the weight of it, its polished edges, how it glinted beneath the lights. “Obviously.” He’d stared at me, clearly not expecting me to agree. I was surprised by his surprise. Why else would I have entered the competition, put in all that work, if I didn’t care for glory? It seems a common enough motivator for men, and it’s never questioned. The realms of history and literature are heavily populated by kings who’ve gone mad for glory, knights who’ve killed in search of
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As I do, a terrible thought dawns on me: that failure is permanent, but success is always fleeting, it always happens in the past tense.
Success is only meant to be rented out, borrowed in small doses at a time, never to be owned completely, no matter what price you’re willing to pay for it.
Sometimes I forget that in the bigger scheme of things, it’s okay to not be the best at everything. To be surrounded by people who can solve problems you can’t, who are talented in different ways, who will go on to change the world. Aaron’s intelligence isn’t just something that will earn him good grades and compliments at dinner parties; it’s what will help him become a brilliant doctor and save lives.
And me learning over time that potential was in itself such an abstract term, tossed around recklessly, that more often than not it simply meant you didn’t live up to the idea somebody else had of you.
“Because I don’t want a quiet life, I want a brilliant one,” I say at last. “Because I need to know what it’s like to win. To be the best.”
Her life is one of exponential growth, the type you can graph out perfectly with a calculator. My life has never been like that. The only discernible pattern, really, is inconsistency: the second I improve in certain areas, I regress in others. My skin becomes clearer, but my hair becomes thinner. My grades in English rise, but my grades in math fall. I start exercising more in the mornings, but stop doing my laundry over the weekends. One step forward and one step back, and repeat, until in the end, it looks like I’ve been standing in the same spot for years.
I’ve never known how to witness dusk without feeling a dull sense of grief: another day gone, another day lost where I’m still the same.
“The world just felt smaller without you,”
But I don’t remember this part at all. That scares me. It makes me wonder what else I’ve forgotten, what else has slipped through the cracks. If I’m forgetting myself too, like everyone else has. Except him.
That’s the problem. I’m not sad because I don’t love life enough, but because I love life too much. I always want more of it.
“What exactly is your definition of a model student?” I ask her. She falters, but I already know what she’s thinking. A model student causes no trouble. A model student makes no noise. A model student gives everything they have and asks for nothing. They simply keep their head down and study and get the best scores on behalf of the school, and then they graduate as valedictorian, with their perfect winning streak, and they head to the best universities in the world to train even harder to become a model citizen, so they can continue to be good. They’re so good that nobody bothers to notice
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The long, languid summer days, the liquid blue of the sky, clear enough to swim through. I miss it all. I miss my life, because even when I felt like I had nothing, I had everything. I just didn’t know it at the time. You never do, until it’s in hindsight.
There’s a certain kind of fear that comes not before or during, but after an event has passed. The same fear that comes after you’ve swerved the car out of the way a second before it crashed; of missing a step and catching yourself right as you’re falling; of noticing a mistake on your test and correcting it before the teacher collects it. The sharp, heart-pounding realization of what could have happened, of how fragile and arbitrary life itself is, of how one moment, one mistake, could have the power to change everything.
“You know, I used to have this theory that if I wanted something badly enough, the universe would make sure to keep it just out of my reach. Like a cruel joke, or a trick. But . . . maybe the cruelest trick the universe can play on us is to give us exactly what we wish for.”
The sun is bursting through my chest, breaking past my lips. It’s my life, I think with amazement, and it’s beautiful, and I can paint it any color I want
