Being a single dad wasn’t my dream. But it was the only thing I had left after everything else in my life felt pointless, and I was going to fight for it if I had to.

I work two jobs to keep a cramped apartment that always smells like someone else’s dinner. I mop.

I scrub. I open the windows. But it still smells like curry, onions, or burnt toast.

Most nights, it feels barely held together.

By day, I ride a garbage truck or climb into muddy holes with the city sanitation crew.

Broken mains, overflowing dumpsters, burst pipes, we get it all.

At night, I clean quiet downtown offices that smell like lemon cleaner and other people’s success, pushing a broom while screensavers bounce across giant, empty monitors.

The money shows up, hangs around for a day, then disappears again.

But my six-year-old daughter, Lily, makes all of that feel almost worth it.

She’s the reason my alarm goes off and I actually get up.

My mom lives with us.

Her movement is limited, and she relies on a cane, but she still braids Lily’s hair and makes oatmeal like it’s some five-star hotel breakfast buffet.

She remembers everything my tired brain keeps dropping lately.

She knows which stuffed animal is canceled this week, which classmate “made a face,” which new ballet move has taken over our living room.

Because ballet isn’t just Lily’s hobby. It’s her language.

When she’s nervous, her toes point.

When she’s happy, she spins until she staggers sideways, laughing like she reinvented joy.

Watching her dance feels like walking out in the fresh air.

Last spring, she saw a flyer at the laundromat, taped crooked above the busted change machine.

Little pink silhouettes, sparkles, “Beginner Ballet” in big looping letters.

She stared so hard the dryers could’ve caught fire, and she wouldn’t have noticed.

Then she looked up at me like she’d just seen a golden nugget.

“Daddy, please,” she whispered.

I read the price and felt my stomach knot.

Those numbers might as well have been written in another language.

But she was still staring, fingers sticky from vending-machine Skittles, eyes huge.

“Daddy,” she said again, softer, like she was scared to wake up, “that’s my class.”

I heard myself answer before thinking.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it.”

Somehow.

I went home, pulled an old envelope from a drawer, and wrote “LILY – BALLET” on the front in fat Sharpie letters.