I realized something was wrong with my body—I had contracted a disease.
The agonizing pain tormented me day and night, until I suddenly felt that life had lost all meaning.
I put a complete stop to all my work and wandered out onto the streets alone.
I had no destination in mind, just walking aimlessly wherever my feet carried me.
I missed my mother more than ever, wishing only to see her face one last time.
I was convinced that only she could offer me a tiny shred of warm comfort.
In my mind, I was already a dead woman walking.
I made my way back to that familiar narrow alley, hoping to catch a single glimpse of her.
Over and over, the memory of her sitting outside the shop front pulling the bellows flashed through my mind.
Yet the steamed bun shop in the lane had its doors tightly shut, leaving no trace of the life it once had.
I asked around the neighborhood, but not a single soul knew where the owner had moved.
The harder she was to find, the more consuming my desire to locate her became.
Like someone who had lost her soul, I drifted through the streets aimlessly for days on end.
In the end, I was still left with nothing.
My mind spiraled into helpless thoughts.
Perhaps she was no longer alive in this world, or maybe she had moved far away with the shop owner.
Maybe she was already thousands of miles away, never to return.
At that thought, all the bottled-up grievance and despair exploded inside me, and I broke down in tears right there on the street.
I went home, carefully changed into a set of clean clothes, and applied fine powder to my face.
Then, I lay quietly on the bed, waiting for death to arrive.
I assumed I wouldn’t last much longer, that sweet relief was just around the corner.
Yet death refused to claim me, and I kept clinging to life against my will.
Just then, a knock sounded at the door—it was a customer looking for me.
“So be it,” I muttered to myself, getting up from the bed.
I received him just like any other day.
I even deliberately passed the sickness in my body onto him.
I didn’t feel a single drop of guilt.
Ending up in this wretched place was never my fault to begin with.
After doing it, a strange sense of dark satisfaction washed over me instead.
I began to smoke and drink, letting myself sink into total degradation.
Though I was still so young, my mind felt as old and weathered as a middle-aged woman in her late thirties or forties.
Dark circles lingered under my eyes year-round, and my palms burned with fever as the disease took deep root inside me.
Yet I couldn’t bring myself to care anymore.
In a world like this, only money mattered if you wanted to survive.
Compared to illness, filling my stomach and keeping breath in my lungs was the only thing that counted.
I never mistreated my own stomach, eating the best food whenever I had the means.
Who in their right mind would willingly suffer through coarse, inedible scraps?
I spent money recklessly on good meals and decent clothes for myself.
Only by doing so could I make up for all the suffering I had endured, offering myself just a tiny bit of justice.