Today, my little sister handed one of her in-progress drawings to me; despite the fact that it was an extremely old, folded, crinkled piece of scratch paper with printing on one side, she had drawn a dragon on the other side.

It was a gorgeous dragon. She had painstakingly drawn hundreds of shaded scales all over it, positioned the wings carefully, and given the dragon an eye and face that seemingly burned with fiery confidence.

She wanted my help in finishing the dragon, so I took it to my room and worked on it for a while. At some point, I flipped the paper over out of curiosity to see what the paper had previously been used for, and discovered that it had been used to print a medical bill from an insurance company over 10 years ago, when my mother had first gotten cancer.

Such an old paper. Once upon a time, it must have been a horrible thing to behold, as it displayed the stunning costs of chemotherapy and depicted the beginning of a five year long period of struggling and suffering and hopelessness revolving around my mother and her metastatic cancer.

But my sister had found it, 10 years later, and turned it into something beautiful. Now, it represents more than the hopelessness of the past. It represents beautiful things: my sister's love for dragons, her determination to embellish the dragon with shading on every little scale, my willingness to help her finish it.

It's as if it were saying, if your life is like a paper printing hopelessness, just turn it over, to the blank side, and draw something beautiful. Make your life beautiful.

-Sayuri