That night, when I came home, the cold bit into my fingertips.The grocery bag in my hand was soaked through. Mother still hadn't returned. The small room glowed dimly under a yellowed light, the sound of wind hissing outside the window frame.
I placed the bag on the table and sat down, but my mind wandered.I couldn't understand why the image of that boy — the one I had met earlier — kept surfacing in my head.
He had been sitting on the pavement, thin shoulders wrapped in a worn jacket, small hands clutching a dented tin can.His hair was a little long, sticking to his damp forehead.When he looked up, his gaze met mine — silent and deep, like the surface of a lake.
Autumn that year was cold to the bone, and its sadness trembled in my chest.It wasn't the look of someone begging — but of someone long accustomed to loneliness.He looked at me and gave a faint smile, barely enough to be called one.
His face was narrow, jawline sharp, skin sunburnt with dirt smudges across his cheeks.And yet, there was something strangely clean about him.His eyes — long, dark, framed by soft lashes — were still and quiet, hiding a kind of weariness that made my heart ache.
A high nose, pale lips, corners always turned down — as if the world had forgotten how to make him smile.When the wind blew, a few strands of hair swayed across his forehead, veiling half his gaze.Just for a moment, something inside me tightened.That face felt both foreign and familiar, like a memory from a faraway dream — distant, and unbearably sad.
I didn't know his name.But even after closing my eyes, that image refused to fade — those quiet eyes, that faint smile, that loneliness carved deep into his expression.
It was as if, for one brief instant, someone had touched a corner of my heart I never knew existed — not with sound, not with grandeur, but with silence that stayed.
I told myself, "Sleep, you have to wake up early tomorrow."
But I didn't sleep that night.I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain tapping against the tin roof.In my head, there was only the image of that boy — thin, cold, yet carrying a smile that made my chest tighten.
Maybe it was because he was like me — a child unloved.
I knew the story of my own birth:I was the result of one night — a mistake among countless nights of work — so much that my mother herself didn't know who my father was.
When I asked, she replied with the same indifference as always:
"Someone not worth remembering."
Back then, hospitals didn't dare perform abortions.And she, though she hated me, still had to give birth — as if I were a debt she could never pay off.
I watched her sleep, her breathing heavy with alcohol.Outside, the river wind rose again, brushing gently against the thin curtain.
I wondered — if I had never been born, would her life have been easier?Would she have been happy, even just a little?
Sometimes I asked myself when she began to hate me.Maybe from the very beginning — even before I was born.
Back then, Lưu Huỳnh Kim Mỹ was twenty-two, in her most beautiful years — a face men couldn't look away from, a figure that owned the room.At Thiên Thanh Nightclub, she was the favorite, the jewel beneath the red lights.
But one night, a drunken man changed everything.
She became pregnant, and her life spiraled downward.Her body faded quickly — acne on her cheeks, pale skin, dry lips. The customers turned away. The owner kicked her out.Those who once called her "the prettiest girl on the street" began to sneer behind her back.
"Her child? No one even knows whose it is."
My mother said she didn't remember.That night was a blur — too many faces, too much chaos.When she woke, there was only blood and pain.
She had wanted to end the pregnancy, but no doctor dared take her in, and she had no money anyway.So she gritted her teeth and endured.
And from the moment I was born, she looked at me as if I had stolen her youth — and everything beautiful she once had.
End of Chapter 2.