The Turning

I entered a university I had never heard of, one I had never dreamed of attending. It wasn’t the school’s fault; the fault, I believed then, was mine. I felt as if I had failed everyone—my parents, my teachers, and the version of myself I had tried so hard to become. Every morning, I spent nearly five hours commuting, drifting between stations like a ghost. Passing through the school gates, I felt strangely like livestock being led to slaughter. It wasn’t fear. It was emptiness. A quiet surrender.

The school itself wasn’t bad. The professors were kind, the students ordinary. The darkness I carried had nothing to do with buildings or people. It came from inside: six years of effort collapsing in a single moment, six years of drawing, studying, pushing myself until I couldn’t breathe—all erased by one test. I didn’t hate the school. I hated myself for entering it.

I thought about repeating the exam, but I remembered the nights of exhaustion, the constant comparisons, the feeling of being measured and cut down by a system that didn’t care who I was. I knew I couldn’t return to that. So I decided to move forward instead. If I couldn’t rewrite the past, I would at least shape whatever future I had left. I studied hard. I attended every class. I collected good grades not because I loved the work, but because I needed to believe something in my life still mattered.

And yet, I refuse to call that period my “dark age.” Even while my heart wandered, something quiet began to grow inside me. A small, stubborn hope. At first it was only a whisper—nothing clear, only a direction. The thought that maybe I could leave again. That maybe the world was larger than this small defeat. That maybe I could still become the person I had once imagined.

Over time, that hope sharpened. It became a plan, then a decision. My sister, who had already gone ahead to New York, told me what to expect, how to prepare, what to fear and what to ignore. Her words felt like footsteps laid across an ocean, showing me where to place mine.

I worked for a year, saving what I could. The hours were long, and I often wondered if I was chasing a dream or running from a memory. Still, something in me insisted on going. As if the version of myself I had lost years ago was waiting somewhere else—somewhere past the horizon of the ordinary life I was living.

So I left. I boarded a plane to New York with a suitcase full of clothes, a year’s worth of savings, and a hope that felt too fragile to name. I didn’t know whether I was escaping or beginning again. Maybe both. But for the first time in a long while, I felt the faint movement of life inside me, as if a door had opened and I was finally stepping through.