I was almost finished with elementary school when my mother sent me to the pawnshop again.
I still couldn’t understand what had happened to my new father.
One day, he had simply disappeared.
No one knew where he had gone.
Even my mother had no idea.
But she kept sending me to school as if nothing had changed.
Somewhere in her heart, she still believed he would come back.
Days passed.
Then weeks.
He never returned.
Not even a letter came.
I began to worry.
I thought my mother would have to go back to washing those filthy clothes for other people.
The thought of seeing her suffer like that again made my heart ache.
But that wasn’t what happened.
My mother didn’t go back to washing clothes.
She still took care of herself.
She still liked flowers and would sometimes put one in her hair.
What confused me most was that she never seemed to cry.
Sometimes, she even smiled.
I couldn’t understand it.
How could she not be sad?
More than once, I came home from school and found her standing alone outside the house, staring into the distance.
She would just stand there.
Quietly.
As if she were waiting for someone.
Then something happened that made me deeply ashamed.
Whenever I walked down the street, strangers would make cruel jokes about my mother.
“Hey, little girl! Give your mother a message for me.”
“Would you like to make some money yourself?”
The words made my face burn.
I lowered my head as far as I could.
I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.
I understood enough to know that those people were saying something dirty about my mother.
But I didn’t know how to fight back.
I didn’t dare ask her about it.
Not even once.
My mother had always been good to me.
She often looked at me seriously and said,
“Study hard.”
“You have to keep going to school.”
She couldn’t read.
She had never had the chance to go to school herself.
Yet she pushed me harder than anyone to keep studying.
Little by little, I began to suspect something.
I started to understand why my mother was doing things I didn’t know about.
She was trying to find a way to keep me alive.
She had run out of choices.
There was simply no other way.
Sometimes those thoughts made me angry.
I wanted to shout at her.
I wanted to ask her why she had to do those things.
But then I would look at her and feel something completely different.
I wanted to hold her.
I wanted to beg her not to sacrifice herself for me.
What I hated most was being so young and helpless.
I couldn’t protect her.
I couldn’t even help her.
And I began to wonder what my education was worth.
What would happen after I finished elementary school?
Would anything really change?
I quietly asked some of my classmates what girls usually did after graduation.
One girl told me that several girls from the class above ours had ended up becoming concubines.
Another said some girls had taken other shameful ways of making money.
I was too young to understand exactly what those things meant.
But I could tell from the way they talked about them that none of it was respectable.
The girls seemed to know much more than I did.
They whispered about things adults never talked about openly.
Their cheeks would turn red as they talked, but there was an odd excitement in their eyes.
The more I heard, the more frightened I became.
I started wondering if my mother was waiting for me to finish school so that I would have to take the same path.
Whenever that thought crossed my mind, I didn’t even want to go home.
I was afraid to face my mother.
Sometimes she gave me a little money for snacks at school.
I never spent it.
Not a single coin.
There were days when I was so hungry during physical education class that my head spun and my vision went dark.
I still refused to spend the money.
I watched the other students happily eating their snacks.
I was jealous.
But I forced myself to save every penny.
I had a small hope that I never told anyone about.
If my mother ever asked me to do something I didn’t want to do, maybe the money I had saved would be enough for me to escape.
Even when I had the most money, it was barely more than a dime.
Those were difficult days.
Sometimes, even in the middle of the afternoon, I would look up at the sky without thinking.
I was searching for that crescent moon.
The moon had become a place for all the feelings I couldn’t put into words.
My fear.
My loneliness.
My shame.
My worry for my mother.
All of it seemed to take the shape of that thin crescent.
It would hang alone in the gray-blue sky, with nothing around it.
Its weak light looked as if it could disappear at any moment.
And I often felt the same way.
As if one day, the darkness would finally swallow me whole.