The first memory that I can remember clearly in my life was the morning when my baby brother woke me up crying. After that, when no one helped for a while, I did my best to hush him. However, for the first time, I noticed the absence of my family. After that time, we never saw our family again. Since then, we have been living together. For most of our years, Aunt Amy was the only help we had. Aunt Amy was our neighbor and saved us in our difficult times. Since she had no children, she treated us as her own. But three years later, we lost her. That was the beginning of things getting worse for us.
We had enough money to live comfortably for a while, as Aunt Amy left us her inheritance just before she died. Even though we didn’t have any housing problems because Aunt Amy’s house was left to us, I had to earn money to buy food for my brother and myself. Although I searched for a job for days, I could not find a job that met my qualifications. The jobs I found were preventing me from taking care of my brother so that I couldn’t get into those jobs. When I saw that the little money left over from Aunt Amy was running out quickly, I started looking for ways to earn money easily. Within a few months, I had the idea to double our remaining money by taking an illegal gamble. Since I already knew this was a risky idea, I went to see the atmosphere with little money.
Of course, I lost the first game I played. After all, I had no experience and did not know the rules exactly. However, despite losing consecutively, this game surprisingly pleased me. The more I played, the more I wanted to play. Moreover, the worst part was that the more risks I took, the more I enjoyed the game. Therefore, our money began to run out even faster. My brother constantly warned me and tried to stop me, but I continued to play without heeding his warnings. After a while, I got a job when I ran out of money, but I was still gambling the money I earned from this job. This has become my addiction. And because of this addiction, I was fired from my job in a short time. Even though I tried different jobs, later on, I always got kicked out for the same reason. After seven years like this, my money finally ran out, and finding a job has become nearly impossible for me. However, I kept borrowing money from my brother, who was working on a coal mine and the only source of income for our house. When he did not give me money, I was taking it by force.
After a while, he couldn’t stand it and ran away from home. Before he left, he said that I had changed a lot and that my gambling addiction would ruin my life if it went on like this. Since I thought he would come back, I did not worry about this situation and waited for him to return. However, when he didn’t come for a long time, I decided to find some money somehow and didn’t want to lose time. I went after easy money by robbing people. I was gambling with the money of the people I robbed, and I was robbing people as I ran out of money. It went on like this for a long time until I made that huge mistake. And one day, I decided to commit another robbery. But this time, I was going to rob a house. I entered the house through the window and stuffed all the valuables I found in a sack. However, the owner of the house woke up and tried to stop me. And because I was afraid of getting caught while we were fighting, I stressed out and accidentally pushed the guy down.
I was quickly caught and taken to court. The court voted for me to be executed. Not only that, they decided to do it in front of the city people. When my execution day came, the council made all the preparations, and people gathered around the guillotine. While I was looking at the crowd, I saw my brother. He was looking at me with pitying eyes. It was then that I genuinely regretted what I had done for the first time. I wanted to go back to my previous life, help my little brother grow up, see Aunt Amy look at us one last time. And that moment, I understood that every moment we do not cherish condemns us to live another life.