You know that smell? Not just soap, but the way steam smells when it’s been forced through a thousand different lives and comes out the other side smelling like nothing at all. It gets into your hair, your pores, until you feel like you’re dissolving into a puddle of bleach and hot air. My hands are always damp. They’re pruned at the tips, the skin gone thin and translucent like those cheap wax paper bags they give you at the corner shop. Sometimes you look down and you don’t even recognize the shape of your own fingers anymore because they’ve spent ten hours a day gripping scalding metal and pulling out heavy, wet sheets that weigh more than your own sense of pride. You spend your whole day touching things you’ll never be able to afford. You smooth out the wrinkles in a silk blouse that costs more than your entire flight here, and for a second, your thumb lingers on the fabric. It’s so soft it feels like a sin. You hate the woman who owns it. You’ve never met her, but you hate her for the way she probably spills red wine on it without a second thought, knowing someone like you will be there at 6 AM to scrub the stain out until your shoulders scream. You fold the sleeves just right—precise, sharp edges—and you want to rip the seams apart just to see if she’d even notice. Then 2 AM hits and you’re staring at that blue light on your phone. You open the app. You type in the numbers. It’s the same every month. You watch the balance drop and you think about how many hours of inhaling lye that represents. You send it home because they need it, because your mother’s voice on the phone sounds like a breaking glass, but there’s this UGLY part of you that wants to scream that you’re dying here. You want to tell her that the daughter she’s so proud of is just a machine that turns sweat into wire transfers. You aren’t a person to them anymore; you’re a check that arrives on the 15th. You remember being nineteen and thinking you were going to be a researcher. A writer. Something that required a brain instead of just a spine that holds up under pressure. You had all these books—real books, the ones with spines that crack and smell like old paper—and now the only thing you read are the washing instructions on the inside of a designer jacket. DO NOT TUMBLE DRY. DRY CLEAN ONLY. It’s like the world is telling you exactly how fragile the important people are while you’re expected to survive a goddamn furnace every single day. It’s the anger that keeps you awake. It’s not a loud anger, it’s just this low, vibrating hum under your skin, like the industrial dryers when they’re off-balance. You’re off-balance. You walk down the street in this city where nobody speaks your language quite right, and you feel like a ghost. You see girls your age sitting in cafes, laughing over overpriced lattes, and you want to walk up to them and show them your palms. You want to ask them if they know what it’s like to work until your fingernails are brittle and yellowed from the chemicals... until your fingerprints are practically erased. Sometimes you just stand in the back of the shop near the big vents where the hot air blows out, and you close your eyes and pretend you’re somewhere else. But the smell always brings you back. It’s that cloying, artificial lavender that tries to hide the scent of everyone else’s dirty secrets. You know things about these people they don’t even know themselves—who bleeds on their sheets, who sweats through their suits in patterns of fear, who has a child that still wets the bed at ten years old. You carry their filth home with you in your lungs. And then you get the message. "Thank you, we bought the medicine," or "The roof is fixed." And you should feel good, right? You should feel like a hero. But you don't. You just feel empty. You feel like you traded your soul for a pile of shingles and a bottle of pills. You’re 25 and you feel 80. You look in the mirror and you see the same permanent squint your father had, the one that comes from looking at things you don’t want to see for too many years in a row. It's an inheritance of exhaustion. You wonder if this is it. If the "better life" everyone talked about back home was just a different kind of cage, one with better ventilation and a higher price tag. You’re not building a future, you’re just staying alive, and there is a HUGE difference between the two that nobody tells you about when they’re waving goodbye at the airport. You’re just fuel. You’re the coal they throw into the engine to keep the train moving, and nobody cares if the coal gets turned to ash as long as the wheels keep turning. You try to remember the person you were before you moved here. The girl who liked poetry and thought she had something to say. But that girl is dead. She drowned in a vat of industrial detergent a long time ago. Now there’s just this person who counts quarters and tries to ignore the way her wrists ache when the weather changes. You want to be MAD at your family for needing you, but you can’t, so you just turn that heat inward until it burns everything up. Tomorrow is Monday. You’ll get up at 5:30. You’ll put on the same damp shoes because they never quite dry out in this humidity. You’ll walk to the station and you’ll stand among a sea of people who don’t see you, and you’ll go back to the steam. You’ll fold the silk, you’ll scrub the stains, and you’ll wait for the next 15th of the month so you can do it all over again. It’s not a life. It’s just... it’s just staying. And god, you are so TIRED of just staying.