I was eighteen when the world made it painfully clear it had no intention of giving me a break. People always talk about teenage years as a golden stretch of freedom and self-discovery, but mine were debt-laden, grief-wrapped, and full of cold, microwaved leftovers. When my parents died in a car accident, the life they left behind did what grief couldn’t — it crushed me slowly. The mortgage, the bills, the endless letters stamped in red ink warnings. I inherited a house, yes, but also a suffocating weight that never left my chest. To survive, I scrubbed tables at a...
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