ALVIS

Born in Hong Kong, a city that never slows down, Alvis was a boy who believed the world was full of things waiting to be discovered. He fell in love with computers early on — the idea that you could build entire realities out of nothing felt like a superpower. He was certain, in the way only children can be, that something great lay ahead of him.

School taught him one thing with absolute clarity: he did not fit the mold. No subject could hold his attention for long, no prescribed path felt like his own, and the definition of success that everyone else seemed eager to pursue felt more like a prison than a destination. He told himself there had to be something beyond it all. Yet no matter how hard he searched, he could not find it. Little by little, the certainty that had once defined his childhood slipped away.

He ended up behind a coffee bar. Not by choice — more as a place to land after running out of better options. The years slipped by. He became skilled at something he had never planned for, smiling at strangers while the version of himself he had imagined at ten years old grew harder and harder to remember. He kept telling himself it was temporary. It was not temporary.

Eventually, the weight of going nowhere became heavier than the fear of trying again. So he went back to school—older than most of his classmates and acutely aware of every year he believed he had lost. The coursework was demanding, but that was not the hardest part. The hardest part was sitting in a classroom, looking toward a future he could not yet see, and wondering whether he had already missed his chance. No one could answer that question for him. Least of all himself.

He got the job. He built real systems, shipped real code, and earned a real degree along the way. By every measure, it should have felt like arriving. Instead, it felt like relief — the shallow, exhausted kind that comes from surviving something, not from winning. He was good at the work. Yet he could not shake the feeling that he had started too late, and that the distance between who he was and who he wanted to be would never fully disappear.

He left everything behind and moved to Canada alone. What he told people sounded like ambition. What it actually was—he is still not entirely sure. He spent his days moving building materials in a warehouse, invisible in a country that did not know his name. The work was honest, but the life felt suspended, as though he were waiting for something he could not quite define.

He is still here. Still building things in the margins of a life that has not unfolded the way he once imagined. The optimism he started with is mostly gone, replaced by something quieter and harder to name—not quite hope, but not surrender either. He keeps moving forward. Whether that is strength, stubbornness, or simply habit, he honestly does not know. The only thing he knows is the time is running out.