Beyond The Reflection
My paychecks—thin slips of paper earned by scrubbing office floors in the morning and standing behind a register in the evening—vanished as soon as I got them; rent, food, and bus fares.
There is always a subtle sense of insufficient resources. Sometimes, late at night, when my siblings were asleep, I’d sit at the kitchen table, staring at the cracked ceiling. My chest would tighten, haunted by a single thought that echoed repeatedly until it hollowed me out: I am failing them.
Tonight, as I walked through the storm, I paused in front of a boutique window. The glass was so clean it almost seemed to disappear, revealing a different world.
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