The ashes fell across her fingertips as she rolled the cigarette lightly, searing a hole into her already torn soul.

It's so lonely, here in the big city, where you can watch the world go by and it's just a fleeting moment in the bright lights and loud noises. The street urchins crawl into dark corners as the police make their nightly sweep, and the squalls of those who can't get away ring clearly through the night.

The city is filled with whorehouses and drug dealers and porn shops, posing as clubs. In the air, you can distinctly smell the stinking aroma of sweat and blood and money, but the policemen walk by anyway, intent on finding another jaywalker to ticket. Inside the houses you can find screaming wives, screaming children, drunk men. The air cries in a loud mournful song as if to speak for the broken homes and bleeding wives that nothing good can come out of this place.

Somehow the visitors never see it, but those of us locked away in this dismal flashing paradise know. We know what it's like to be beaten and broken and we know what it's like to cry and we're never, ever going to go away, because there's nothing you can do to kill us. We've survived hell and come back to talk about it. We are the commoners, who eat the scraps you throw out just to stay alive, but we are also the kings and queens of the world, because you will never break our pride. It's all we have.

We will never leave this prison, simply because it's our home. Nobody out there would ever understand how we cling to each other, how, even in the smell and the noise and the heat of our pride, we are terribly, terribly alone. Nobody can understand what we have gone through, what it has taken to live here. And yet we would throw it away in an instant for a second chance, for a chance to live.

So the next time you see us in the shadowed alleys, frightened in the doorways, sleeping in the rain, remember that once we could have been one of you. Once we had been that girl you bought for a night, whom you covered with the heat of your body and the smell of your sweat as your wife slept alone. Remember that we could have been that young woman who handed you a smile on the streets, bright and proud and full of dreams. Remember that once we were beautiful, once we were strong, but we are still here, and we are still proud. And you can never, ever take that away from us.

Break us if you want; it wouldn't be the first time. But while you're walking away, laughing, flip us a coin.

I need a beer.