The feeling that I am experiencing right now is slightly difficult to bring into fruition as literature, but please understand that I am trying my best.

A fish that lives beneath the sea, watching seagulls depart. To be honest, I believe that everyone, at some point in their life, becomes that fish: living within restraints imposed by circumstance, or, more often than not, the quiet conviction that they have not yet become enough. From below, they watch the flock—people they admired, or once, had the simple privilege of knowing—drift beyond the horizon of what they had thought would last forever.

It is almost a bittersweet feeling: our rational minds tell us to let go, to swim back to fulfill the life we currently have. Yet as we carry our dejected bodies forward, our souls cannot help but wonder whether we can truly become those seagulls. We wonder if there will come a moment when we are able to spread our wings and look down—just as we once looked up at them.

Perhaps this season of life has something to do with the peculiar feeling of midnight on a school day. The people with whom I spent so much time, once occupied the spaces wherever I went, now appear only in fragmented, disjointed shards of a mirror that used to be: posts of graduation gowns and mortarboards thrown into the air; an unfamiliar arm around a familiar shoulder; cafés; birthdays with gatherings I can only watch from afar. Their lives seem to have acquired a kind of momentum, their velocities persistent and relentless as they prepare to enter their next chapters, while mine has corridored into revision notes, dormitory fridges stocked with everyone trying to shove their food, and, above all, the forty-five-ton weight we haul to school every day as we jokingly refer to it as International Bullying.

The fish often wonders what his own future might look like. Reading old essays by seniors makes him look up a few of their names, almost absent-mindedly—and the first thing he sees is a Jardine Scholarship. Ouch. It is difficult not to feel, for a moment, as though everyone else has already learnt to fly while he is still trying to remember how to breathe underwater.

Or maybe the fish has spent so long looking towards the sky that he has forgotten to ask whether life might exist beyond both air and water.

It would be wrong to claim that I begrudge them their flight. I am happy that they have found people to love and care for, identities that, for now, they aim to grow into, and futures that seem to open naturally before them. Alas, happiness does not cancel absence. An ache pops up, just in random moments like these, in realizing that a person can still matter deeply to you while no longer being part of the dynamic of your everyday life. I just can’t help but pity the fact that our lives diverged like pool balls: as the cue—the incident—hits the stable configuration, our lives have begun to move in different speeds, in erratic and unpredictable directions.

I have come to the understanding that this is precisely what growing up asks of us: not to stop looking at the people who have gone ahead, nor to turn our admiration into resentment, but to loosen our grip on the idea that we must arrive where they have arrived, at the same time and in the same way. The sea is not a failed prototype of the sky. The fish may never fly, but maybe it was never meant to in the first place.

So he returns to the strange little life he has built over the past two and a half years. He ventures further into the deep water—not because he has stopped wondering about the sky (he still does), but because there are still parts of his own world he has yet to see.