I don't know if this is the right place for this but I'm sitting here on my bed and the fan is just clicking and clicking and I can't stop thinking about the basement in that city across the ocean where I spent my twenties. I think maybe I made a mistake forty years ago and I've just been living with it ever since because I was young and I thought I was being good and noble but now I'm sixty-two and I feel like I'm just a shell of a person who never really got started. I had these charcoal sticks in my bag when I got off the plane and I really thought I was going to be an artist or someone important but then I saw the bills and I saw how much my mother back home was counting on me and I just tucked those sketches away in a drawer and I never really took them out again. I got that job at the laundry service because they didn't ask for papers and it was so hot in there that my hair was always damp and the smell of bleach was so strong it felt like it was burning the back of my throat but I just kept folding and folding. I'd fold the sheets and I'd fold the shirts and I'd imagine they were big white canvases and I'd trace patterns in the steam on the windows with my finger but the steam always cleared and the patterns went away and it was just me and the machines again. I sent every paycheck back home in those thin blue envelopes and I told them I was doing great and I told them I was seeing the museums and the parks but I was really just seeing the inside of a concrete room and the bottom of a heavy iron and my own red hands. I think maybe I wanted them to tell me to stop or to come home but they just sent letters back talking about how my brother could afford his medical books now and how the roof didn't leak when it rained anymore and I felt so PROUD but I also felt like I was disappearing bit by bit. I don't know if that makes me a bad person or a selfish daughter but I'd sit there at lunch eating my cold rice and I'd look at my hands and they were getting so rough and the calluses were getting thick and I knew deep down I couldn't hold a fine brush anymore without my fingers cramping up. I tried one time to draw the woman who worked next to me because she was so beautiful in a sad way but I couldn't get the lines right and I felt so ashamed that I just ripped it up and threw it in the lint bin. There was this one morning when the sun hit the soap bubbles in the big industrial sink and they turned all these beautiful colors like oil on water and I just stood there for a minute and I thought I might die from how much I wanted to paint it and just BE an artist for one second. But my boss yelled at me to get back to work and he called me a name that I didn't quite understand because my English wasn't good yet but I knew what his face meant and I just looked down at the gray floor and kept scrubbing. I think that was the moment I realized I wasn't a person with dreams anymore and I was just a machine that turned dirty clothes into money for people thousands of miles away who didn't know what the air felt like in that basement. My brother is an engineer now and he has a big house and he's very kind to me and he even sent me a check for my birthday last month but I just stared at it and I wanted to cry because I didn't want the money I wanted the years back.