Lian sat cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, surrounded by a quiet storm of old sketchbooks.
There were at least six of them—bent, stained, pages curled from humidity. He hadn't opened some of them in months. Others, not since China.
He flipped one open, slowly.
The first page showed a fox. Sharp lines, narrowed eyes, red and gold ink. He'd drawn it the week after the fight with his father, the one about the broken plate and the silence that followed.
Below it, in smaller writing: "Too many smiles. Hides too much."
He touched the corner of the page.
Had that been about his father? Or himself?
He kept turning. Pandas with kind eyes. Tigers with cracked claws. Spiders drawn again and again, each with a different expression—some cruel, others hollow.
There was a time when each animal had felt like the answer.
Now, they just looked like questions he'd been afraid to ask.
He gently tore one page free. A phoenix—mid-flight, wings trailing smoke. He remembered drawing it after his mother told him a story about her own childhood, her voice hushed like she wasn't supposed to speak it aloud.
He set the page aside, smoothing the crease with his palm.
A knock.
Jamie.
He let her in, stepping over a sprawl of journals.
She paused in the doorway, surveying the mess. "Wow. Is this your Animal Graveyard?"
He grinned, a little embarrassed. "Something like that."
She picked up a sketch of a deer with wild eyes. "I remember this one. You gave it to me after that group project. Said I was like this."
"You were," Lian said. "Still are, kinda."
Jamie sat beside him. "You keeping all of them?"
"I don't know," Lian said. "I think… they were how I made sense of things. But I don't need them the same way anymore."
She held the phoenix sketch in her hands, turning it carefully.
"It's beautiful," she said. "What's this one mean?"
Lian hesitated. "My mom."
Jamie nodded. "You should keep that one."
They sat in silence, surrounded by feathers and ink and memory.
Jamie reached for her backpack and pulled something out. A folded piece of paper, yellowed at the edges.
"Here," she said. "You gave me this last year. Remember?"
He took it.
It was one of his earliest drawings—an awkwardly shaded monkey with stars in its eyes.
"I forgot about this," he said, half-smiling. "Why'd you keep it?"
Jamie shrugged. "I guess I thought… if you ever stopped seeing people that way, someone should remember when you did."
He looked at her.
"Thanks," he said, and meant it.
That night, Lian gathered the pages into two piles: one to keep, one to let go.
He didn't throw anything away. Not yet. Just placed them in a box.
Like artifacts. Not definitions.
He taped the phoenix sketch to the wall above his desk. It caught the light just right—flame-colored even in shadow.
Below it, he wrote:
"Old stories still matter. Even when they're not the whole story."
And in smaller print:
"I'm still writing mine."