I forced myself to laugh, forcing myself to indulge in wild, crazy behavior.
The pain locked in my chest cut far too deep to be washed away by a few tears.
I knew a ruined life like mine didn’t seem worth mourning over.
Yet this was still a living, breathing human life, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away so easily.
Besides, ending up in this wretched pit was never my fault to begin with.
People feared death only because living still held the promise of something beautiful.
I was never afraid of the pain that death might bring.
The agony I dragged myself through day after day was already a hundred times worse than dying.
I clung desperately to life, yet I knew I shouldn’t be surviving in such a humiliating, degraded way.
My mind constantly drifted toward visions of a quiet, decent existence.
It felt like falling into a brief, gentle dream.
Yet the dream vanished in the blink of an eye, crushed instantly by the weight of reality.
Holding that fragile daydream up against my raw existence only left me feeling more suffocated and heartbroken.
I saw the truth with brutal clarity now: this world was never a gentle dream.
It was a real, grinding, relentless hell on earth.
My mother noticed the heavy gloom and suffocating pain that consumed me every single day.
“Find a man and get married,” she urged me softly one afternoon. “Settle down and live a normal life.”
Getting married meant guaranteed food and shelter, freeing me from this daily struggle.
And through my marriage, she could build a tiny nest egg to rely on in her old age.
I had become her one and only hope, the sole pillar supporting the rest of her life.
Yet as I looked out at the vast, cold world around me, a single question echoed in my mind:
“Just who out there would ever marry me?”