Chapter Text
Nothing in my life turned out exactly the way I imagined it would back then, when I still believed that growing up meant, in some magically way, finding a comfortable place in the world, as if life had some kind of delayed maternal instinct and decided to cradle you just because you reached a certain age. Today I know that’s a lie. Life doesn’t cradle anyone — it grabs you by the collar, shakes you until every last scrap of hope falls out of your pockets, and then charges emotional rent for every minute you dare to keep breathing. It’s a giant pimp, and you’re the whore trying to negotiate crumbs of dignity between one fall and the next. But I didn’t know that at the time. I still had that kind of pathetic naïveté of someone who thinks that if they do everything right, someone, somewhere, will notice and say: congratulations, you beat the tutorial phase of existence.
I had just arrived in the city, knew absolutely no one, had recently graduated, and was in that delicate phase where you start realizing your diploma mostly works as an emotional paperweight. I wanted to work, needed to work, so I did what any functional adult does when they haven’t completely lost faith in humanity yet: I sent résumés. Lots of them. To too many places. For jobs ranging from “administrative assistant” to “coordinator of who-knows-what,” even though I hadn’t coordinated so much as a grocery store line in my life. But you know how hard it is to get a job, right? It doesn’t matter how much you study, it doesn’t matter how loudly your résumé screams in neatly organized letters that you’re qualified, no one really seems interested in finding out whether you can actually do what you say you can. The interviews lasted five minutes, at most, and in those five minutes I had to deal with that specific look — the look that says why did this human being have the audacity to apply for this? — followed by some ridiculous challenge, a logic test, a humiliating group dynamic, or a form that looked like it had been created by someone who deeply hated their own species.
Two days later came the automated message, polite enough to not be honest: unfortunately, we regret to inform you, but we’ve decided to move forward with another candidate. They regretted nothing. A bunch of bitter old people doing overtime on Earth, thinking they still had the moral authority to judge who does or doesn’t deserve to pay bills. But I swallowed all of it, because I had to, because rent doesn’t take excuses, and because, at the time, I still had enough energy to be mildly devastated by every new rejection, as if it were the first, as if one of them wouldn’t eventually work out by pure statistics.
There was a specific moment — a particularly miserable day, when I had just walked out of an interview so short I barely had time to sit — when I seriously considered starting to growl at the next interviewer who looked at me with contempt. Like, just completely abandoning whatever scraps of civility I had left and accepting my definitive transformation into a hostile urban creature. But it was exactly during that period of low faith in humanity that, for some inexplicable reason, luck decided to sing in my direction. Or at least that’s what I thought it was back then. Ah, sweet naïve creature that I was. I had so many chances in life. None of them I knew how to recognize in time.
I landed an interview with the owner of Luxus. He gave me almost no details about the position, just an address, a time, and that mysterious tone people use when they want to sound important without explaining why. He told me to go the same day and hung up. Me, with absolutely no concrete information about the hole I was about to crawl into, realized that if I wanted to arrive on time, I had to leave home at that exact moment. So I went on my way trying to figure out on my phone where exactly I was headed, and all I managed to find was that Luxus was the biggest modeling agency in the city — maybe the country — and was run by a man named Jinbe, until then completely unknown to me, but whom, in retrospect, I consider the first pillar of my current life expectancy being reduced by chronic stress.
The building was huge. Like, fucking huge. The kind that makes you feel small before you even step inside, as if the architecture itself were already warning you that you don’t belong there, but you can try pretending for a few minutes if you want. Still, surprisingly, the reception staff were kind to me. Too kind, even. Today I understand that was probably preemptive pity. They knew what was waiting for me. They knew I was about to make a mistake of mythological proportions. But they smiled, gave me directions, and wished me good luck in that specific way that sounds less like encouragement and more like a farewell.
I went up to the indicated floor, walked into Jinbe’s office, and he started asking questions that, at the time, I considered normal, but that today I recognize as the first red flags being waved enthusiastically in my face. He asked if I knew anything about fashion, if I knew designers, if I followed shows, trends, that kind of thing. I said I knew a few things, that I was interested, that I’d love to learn more from people who actually understood the subject, in that humble yet hopeful tone of someone who still believes honesty is a valid currency in the job market. The truth is, I knew absolutely nothing. Nothing. I learned that day, for example, that when people talked about caramel, they weren’t referring to a sweet topping, but to a specific shade of brown. It was a cultural shock I still haven’t fully recovered from.
Then he explained what the job would be: personal assistant to the agency’s top model. Roronoa Zoro. And I, in my legendary naïveté, immediately believed Jinbe had seen some kind of hidden potential in me, a rare spark, maybe even a secret calling to deal with beautiful egos and chaotic schedules. Little did I know that, in reality, that old man was throwing me straight into the lion’s mouth using nothing but an emotional loincloth to cover me. They were so desperate to fill that position that they conveniently omitted the small detail that Zoro was a monumental asshole, a professional dick, the biggest pain in the ass ever officially registered, the perfect fusion between the dumbest person you can imagine and the most sly and cynical person you’d have the displeasure of meeting in any timeline.
But I, being just a dumb little blond trying to survive, didn’t find any of that suspicious. Not the mystery, not the rush, not the fact that no one wanted to talk much about him. When Jinbe said I could start the next day, I genuinely felt like I had won at life. Like, internal epic music playing, slow motion, me walking down the street with the feeling that something was finally going right. Little did I know that wasn’t the beginning of my professional rise — it was the prologue to my emotional ruin in daily chapters.
The next day, when I showed up for work and was finally introduced to that green-haired creature who looked like he’d ripped grass out of the ground and glued it to his own head, he spent at least ten minutes — no exaggeration — explaining how stupid I looked, how fake my hair seemed, and how I had such a fragile face I probably wouldn’t even last a month working with him. It was in that same time span that I also learned he had a reputation for driving every assistant insane until they quit, crying, screaming, or having an existential breakdown in the office bathroom. It was almost a talent. A gift. A curse. A sport.
What he didn’t expect, though, was that I was a starving mess desperate for a job, someone who needed that paycheck more than I needed emotional stability, and who, on top of that, was already slightly unhinged even before meeting him. So instead of running, crying, or suing someone, I stayed. I stayed out of sheer stubbornness, necessity, wounded pride, and maybe that morbid curiosity of someone who wants to see just how far something can go wrong before it becomes physically dangerous.
And that’s how it’s been ever since. From that first day until today, marking exactly six years since that green demon entered my life, destroyed any chance of me ever associating the color green with anything positive again, and turned my routine into an unstable mix of chaos, insults, stress, and a coexistence so absurd that, at some point between hatred and resignation, it simply became… normal. Normal in the most tragic sense of the word. Normal like only something you can no longer escape can ever be.