[dessgeega]

oh, you kids. you children.

i had no parents, but sprung into life from the earth and ash underneath a girder in a construction yard. in my first moments of life, i had to lift that girder up and off me, with only my own tiny pink hands. there was no one to help me. those early days i lived in a rolled-up newspaper in the corner of the construction site, only emerging at night to gather scraps left behind from the workers' lunches. after six months, i felt strong enough to work for my sustenance, and i applied for work with the construction team. clad only in the large, discarded boot of a former worker, i hammered rivets into the protean walls by doing flips and kicking the nails into the girders with the sole of my hardy shoe. all of the hardhats were too big for my tiny, near-hairless head. to protect myself from debris i would have to crawl into my shoe and flip over, balancing on the neck of the shoe as the sole weathered the brunt of the debris. in this way we built what is today an office skyscraper, a vital part of the local economy, and when it was completed i realized that, at the age of one year, it was time for me to set off and make my place in this world. i slung a stunned alley cat over my shoulder and hopped down the road in my boot, never to look back.

so remember, friends, as you brag of how you've clawed yourselves by the knuckles of your teeth out of your parents' homes and into the cold, unremitting light of the world, that even such ordeals are as luxuries to a child who wrought her own life with nothing but the boot on her body and the dream in her chest, and be humble.
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