Living the Dream—2026-07-14 (Patreon)

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WHAT IT IS by Tyra Wilson

Tyra Lasoya Wilson sat on the front steps of the Bond Project Apartments, watching the afternoon settle over Somerville, Tennessee, without changing much of anything.

The sky was mostly cloudy, the air was hot enough to make her skin shine, and inside her apartment, the A/C ran with the tired sound of something that had stopped trying ages before.

She worked at McDonald’s that morning. She would be there again tomorrow. Maybe drive-through, maybe front counter, maybe somebody would call out and she would stay late because she was the one they knew would stay.

Then she would come home, lock the door, turn on the television for noise, eat something, and go to bed so she could wake up and do it again.

It wasn’t the life Cody promised when he brought her to Somerville in 2022. His new start turned out to mean an apartment in her name, bruises she learned to hide, and coming home one day a year later to find his clothes and the good TV gone.

He left the key on the counter like that made it decent, and she never heard from him again. Tyra eventually understood that his leaving might have been the best thing he ever did for her.

She still had the apartment and the job she took because rent was due and nobody was coming to rescue her.

She had Mt. Olive now too, and people there who said God had a plan, that He could make all things new, that her past did not get the final word.

Tyra believed them. Most days she did. Believing did not make the rent cheaper or the shifts shorter, and it did not turn her into somebody who knew what came next.

It only meant she was trying not to go backward.

So this was where she was. Twenty-six years old, sitting on the concrete steps outside her apartment, wearing new blue flip-flops and her old black shorts—like that mattered for some reason. She had a job she could do and a door nobody else had a key to.

It was not much of a life, but it was hers. Tomorrow would be mostly like today, just later, and for now Tyra had decided that was what it was.

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All characters in this story are fictional characters, their images generated with AI for AGI Stories. They do not represent any real person, nor is their appearance based on any real human.

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