Never Thought I'd End Up Here

by Ann Liang

Even if it’s purely out of spite, I’m going to have the time of my life.

And if you have any questions,” Wang Laoshi adds, “please do hesitate to ask me. It’s best you work it out yourself.”

The career counselor recommended that I try a process of elimination until I found the pathway that spoke to me, but I’d made my way down an entire list of possible degrees, and none of them spoke at all. None of them even spluttered at me.

With other people, no matter how close I’m standing next to them, it feels like they’re looking at me from a distance, and I’m only half there. But Cyrus’s gaze pierces right through me, rooting me here, in the cold, thin air of the mountains and the soft spray of rain on my skin and the crevices in the stones underfoot.

And my heart swells at the silly, simple, human fact that when we stumble upon something beautiful, our first instinct is to show it to the people we love. It’s what we do with pretty seashells on a beach, a radiant sunset, a rare bird flitting through the trees, a herd of wild horses grazing in the countryside. Look, we say, saving these little pieces of beauty for each other. Do you see it too? Isn’t the world such a strange, lovely, breathtaking place?

I’m still not sure where I’ll end up a month from now, or a year, or half a life, whether I’ll find something I love as much as I love this moment, and whether it’ll last. But all I have to do is look out at the sky, that deep, lovely, endless blue, and remember that no matter where I end up, joy will never be too far out of reach.

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