The sky was heavy with the colors of dusk as the sun dipped low behind the skyline. On the roof of a tall, crumbling apartment building, some 20 meters above the quiet street below, a woman stood motionless. Her thin, worn dress fluttered in the evening wind, and her face—lined with fatigue and despair—was turned toward the horizon, where the last light of day fought against the encroaching dark.
She held a child—barely two years old—limp and quiet in her arms. His cheeks were sunken, his clothes stained and too small. He clung to her not with joy or playfulness, but out of instinct, as if he knew his mother was his last and only refuge.
But that refuge was failing.
The mother, no older than 25, looked down at the street far below. She wasn’t there out of recklessness or curiosity. She was there because she was exhausted—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Life had drained her. The endless cries, the hunger, the constant fear of tomorrow—it had become too much. The weight of motherhood, once a beautiful idea, had turned into a burden she could no longer carry. Not alone. Not like this.
She whispered broken apologies to the boy. “I tried,” she said, voice cracking. “I really did.”
No one else was on the roof. No helping hand. No listening ear. Just her, the child, and the growing silence of a world that had looked away too many times. The city moved on below—cars honking, lights flickering, people hurrying home—while she stood still, caught in a moment where everything felt like too much and not enough at the same time.
This wasn’t a scene about hate. It was about exhaustion. About hopelessness. About a mother who had loved her child so deeply, but had found herself lost in a world that offered no support, no shelter, and no second chances.
And the child—“poor baby,” someone might later say—was too young to understand any of it. Too young to know that his mother wasn’t cruel, only broken. And on that rooftop, 20 meters high, broken sometimes feels like the end.
