A Gift
喜获

“The tender joy of self-discovery
原来我们本来就值得拥有。”

oil on canvas
31x41cm

For days he lumbered on in the dessert, the scorching sun beating down on his black, rusty hide. The sky was a flat, chalky blue,  like the canvas of a painting that stretched above him.

The dull yellow sand sprawled endlessly ahead of him, without even a hint of the gleam of water and fruit. Not even the pale, dusty mirages that had fooled him countless times since he had embarked on this fruitless journey.

He had lost count of how many others had turned back over the years. How many times he had been told he wouldn’t make it - not him. Not him with his crooked frame, his slow gait, his odd, clunky shape.

But he walked anyway. For the little ones at home. For every voice that had whispered doubt to him. For the quiet hope that he stubbornly carried, even when he didn’t believe it himself.

Surely miracles weren’t real. But he couldn’t give up now.

Then suddenly, in the distance, something glinted. Perhaps yet another trick of the light or an illusion. The bright, golden glimmer of the promised fruit. Was it possible that he could have found it?

Him?

He approached slowly.

Step by step, the round, ripe and radiant shape took form. The solidness of the fruit, with the fragrant, sweet scent that told him, undeniably, that he had found it.

A wave of emotion rushed over him – disbelief, gratitude and a fragile joy that had waited a lifetime – and a tiny, glimmer of hope that he scarcely dared to let himself feel, that maybe, just maybe, he had been enough all along.

We wander for years, carrying our self-doubt, convinced of our own lacking. Yet the truest gifts arrive when we overcome our deepest fears, like water seeping into a desert – telling us we were deserving all along.