An Unfinished Story

An Unfinished Story#

My last day as an undergraduate at Peking University felt just like the morning I first arrived four years ago. The air then was cool and filled with a vague but passionate hope for the future; today, the warmth is tinged with the sadness of parting.

As I start to write, I realize the torrent of thoughts that once surged within me has crumbled into fragments. Graduation, it turns out, isn’t a grand finale but a quiet exit. I never found a single label for these four years. They feel like an untitled manuscript, a hurried ending to a quest for meaning that was just beginning.

Four years was long enough to eat my weight in braised chicken from the Shaoyuan canteen. Yet, it was short enough that I never managed to try breakfast anywhere but the Jiayuan and Xueyi canteens, or find time to just sit in the old library and nap between study sessions. I always thought I had all the time in the world, only to watch it slip away. These small, unfinished tasks, like un-dog-eared pages in a book, have become part of the story, reminding me that life is a journey with its share of blank spaces.

On my first day, I met two upperclassmen on the winding path in front of the Qiu Deba Sports Hall. Their simple “Welcome to PKU” became my first real connection to this campus. The path sloped upwards, much like my own winding but ever-forward journey. Before I even started, I told myself to accept my own ordinariness and make peace with my expectations. I tried to listen to my inner voice, but was ultimately consumed by the pressure of my GPA. Peking University is vast enough to hold countless dreams; grades are just one measure of success, and by no means the only one. A person’s worth should never be defined by a transcript. What matters more is finding what makes your eyes light up, what allows your voice to be heard and your presence to be felt. Making your voice heard and your efforts count is far more meaningful than exhausting yourself on a crowded track.

As a small experiment in my sophomore year, I began organizing my course materials ↗. I wasn’t trying to build a monument, just leave a trail of footprints—a small light for those who would come after me. If it helped someone avoid a few detours on their own path, that would be the best farewell I could imagine. Maybe one day I’ll fade from everyone’s memory. But if, late one night, a student looks at my notes and softly reads the title, in that moment, my youth will be with them. My thoughts will have found a small piece of eternity on this campus. This endeavor was also inspired by my dear friend Arthals ↗, who showed me that sharing knowledge is an act of creation in itself.

The time to say goodbye has come. We turn, packing the seasons of Peking University into our bags, and head toward a future without walls. Most of us will fade from the grand narratives and become ordinary people, our faces perhaps indistinct in a crowd, but our lives incredibly real.

But this isn’t the end of the story. Remember the young man who once gazed at the stars from Building 45B. Hold on to that stubborn refusal to compromise with the world. That is the most precious treasure in our bags. It will remind us in the storms to come that even on an ordinary path, we must create our own echo.

Epilogue#

Destiny, it seems, has a habit of leaving clues where you least expect them. As one of the first students from the School of Information Science and Technology to check in, I was the first to step into Building 45B. After watching several floor managers come and go, by a strange twist of fate, I inherited the “mantle” of being the WeChat group admin for the third and fourth floors. This absurd little detail became an unexpected chapter in my story—perhaps time’s own quirky way of commemorating that first morning my journey began.