“My mother was right,” I thought to myself, staring into the cracked mirror.
People like us really were squeezing ten years of aging into every single year.
After two or three years of drifting through this haze, I could clearly feel that I had changed completely.
My skin had grown rough and dry, losing every bit of its former smoothness.
My lips were permanently chapped, looking dull and ruined.
My eyes stayed cloudy, shot through with red veins, carrying a heavy, broken fatigue.
I woke up late every single day, yet my entire body remained completely drained of energy.
I could see my own decay clearly, and the patrons coming and going could see it just as well.
The familiar regular clients slowly stopped coming around.
When dealing with new faces, I tried with everything I had to please them and cater to their whims.
Yet deep in my chest, my disgust toward them only grew thicker.
Most of the time, I couldn’t even control my own temper anymore.
I became irritable and quick to anger, rambling incoherently and spouting nonsense without thinking.
I was no longer the pure, clean girl I used to be.
It was as if my mouth had picked up a terrible habit, blurting out crazy, unfiltered thoughts on its own.
Those refined, respectable gentlemen gradually stopped visiting me altogether.
There was no longer a single trace of that gentle, submissive softness left in me.
That fragile, helpless act was the only thing they cared for—the illusion they used to feel good about themselves—and now it was gone for good.
I had no choice but to mimic the roughest streetwalkers just to get by.
I dressed in loud, tacky clothes, throwing all dignity out the window.
Only this cheap, exaggerated style could catch the eye of the crude patrons who didn’t care about rules.
I painted my lips a vivid, bloody red, trading sharp insults and rough talk with them.
Yet surprisingly, this wild, unhinged behavior was the exact thing that satisfied them the most.
More often than not, I felt as if I could see my own corpse lying right in front of me.
Every client I took on, every single dollar I earned, felt like dying just a little bit more.
Everyone said money was supposed to sustain life and keep you alive.
Yet the way I earned money was doing the exact opposite—slowly draining and consuming my very life away.
I stood by with open eyes, watching myself rot day by day, quietly waiting for the moment of total destruction.
Once I accepted that, I didn’t want to overthink anything anymore.
There was no point worrying about the future, no use crying over fate.
“Just drag yourself through the days,” I told myself flatly. “Numb and quiet.”
My mother was my future—a living, breathing mirror of what I was becoming.
The absolute best ending I could hope for was simply living long enough to turn into her.
Spending an entire life relying on my flesh to survive, burning through every drop of youth and soul.
And when old age finally arrived, all that would be left was a head of white hair and a body covered in rough, withered skin.
That was the humble, helpless reality of a life like ours.