It was the summer of 2020, and the world had stopped. People stayed inside. Relationships faded. Neighbors were afraid to attend funerals. Fear settled into everyday life like dust on furniture. But none of that touched Ali. The only thing on his mind was when the pandemic would end so he could leave for Korea. He had been dreaming about it for over a year. Then another year passed. The borders were still closed. Ali had just turned 17, and things at home were getting harder. The tension inside the house had started to feel heavier than the silence outside. He had one desire: to go somewhere far. Far from everything, far from everyone he knew. Before he even turned 18, he left for Amur, a cold and remote city in Russia, to work. The moment his plane touched down, the tall buildings and modern streets he had imagined for so long disappeared. Reality looked nothing like the dream. But he stayed. He didn't speak the language. He had no real skills. Every time his family called and asked how he was doing, he told them everything was fine. He kept his struggles to himself. Then the factory where he worked shut down because of the war between Russia and Ukraine. Ali started making calls, reaching out to contacts across Russia, asking if anyone knew of work. Eventually he decided to join his older brother in another city. The job was in construction. He worked as hard as he could. But next to the experienced men around him, his effort seemed invisible. It never felt like enough. Years passed. His Russian improved. He started thinking about universities in Russia. When he finally shared that idea with his brother, the response cut him in a way he hadn't expected. His brother told him that his friends who were studying had parents who supported them, but they didn't have a father like that. That one sentence put out the last small flame Ali was still carrying. It hit harder than anything else could have — because his brother was the one person he had believed in most. He left his brother's city and moved again. Found work through someone he knew. But the thought of studying never left him. What he could never understand was the older men around him, men past 60, still living alone in distant cities, still away from their families. At night, a question kept circling in his head: What if I'm still doing this when I'm old? How long will I stay away from the people I love? He spent winters in bitter cold and summers in burning heat, sharing a small train container with three other men. The heating pipe barely worked. Ali had lined the left wall with cardboard to block the chill, but even that had iced over, a thin layer of frost settling across it like a second skin. At night, his roommates snored and argued over nothing — the kind of small irritations that grind a person down when there is no space to escape. But instead of breaking him, all of it made him harder. Quieter. More certain. Then one day, a friend told him the Korean language exam registration had opened for university applicants. He suggested Ali might want to go home and prepare. Ali called his mother and brother. He was coming back — to study, then Korea. They didn't say much. They left the decision to him. Back home, he studied with the kind of focus that doesn't come from discipline alone. It comes from years of wanting something so badly that it becomes the only option. He would wake up in the middle of the night and immediately reach for practice tests. He would analyze his mistakes before going back to sleep. When the exam came, he had reached the highest level in six months. During his time at the language academy, he made close friends, became one of the top students of the year, and finally felt something he had been missing for a long time: a sense of belonging. Then came the applications to Korean universities, and the visa process. Even as he cleared every obstacle, he noticed something in his family's eyes. Not pride. Not excitement. A quiet kind of doubt. That hurt more than anything Russia had thrown at him. But Ali didn't stop. He was accepted to one of Korea's most respected universities on a full scholarship. His visa came through quickly. And just like that, the door he had been walking toward for years finally opened. He was young in age. But something in him had already shifted. Korea was calling. The university was real. But inside there was a weight he hadn't expected — he was leaving his mother alone again. He had fought for this. And now that it was here, he wasn't sure he wanted it anymore. But he went anyway. And somewhere on that journey, it hit him. The 17-year-old who had first packed a bag and run toward something unknown was gone. He didn't leave dramatically. He just quietly stopped existing — replaced by someone who understood that moving forward sometimes costs you something real.