I had waited a year for this moment. The moment where I could finally walk into Republic City's Pro-bending Arena and watch a match. But not just any match, the Championship match.

About a year ago, I really got sucked into the world of pro-bending. In the evening, after walking home from a long day at work, I would often pass by shops and apartments with radios in their open windows blasting the pro-bending matches. After weeks of catching parts of matches I became curious of what this sport was all about. Ideally, I'd find a building next to an alleyway that had the match on and sit myself down on the cold cement in the darkness of the back alley. I'd listen to the live commentary of the game until it was over then grab some dinner and head on home.

After listening to last year's Championship match, the sport really grabbed me and captivated me. I fell in love with the game and promised myself that I would be at the following year's Championship match. Ever since last year's Championship match, I have never missed a game on the radio. On game nights, I snuck out of work early so that I could find a place that was airing the game on their radio. Of course, this isn't always as easy as it sounds so I did miss the start of some games.

But here I am now, in the Pro-bending Arena. It wasn't simple to get the tickets to this match either. I had to buy them three months in advance and even then they were almost all sold out. Also, I had to sacrifice two months' worth of dinner to even afford the tickets.

I'm seventeen years old and I've spent almost half of my life as an orphan living on the streets. For nine years, my mother and I lived in a very small one bedroom apartment with a kitchen and bathroom in the Dragon Flats borough of Republic City. My mother worked long hours at the Republic City power plant and earned a decent pay. She was a firebender that could generate lightning, so she worked in the bowels of the plant creating lightning all day long to help power the city. Unfortunately, three-fourths of her months wage went to paying the rent on our apartment. What was left of her wage went to paying for the electricity and water utility bill. After all the bills were paid for, we had almost no money to spend on food for ourselves. The Triple Threat Triad also had a big presence in our neighborhood and would sometimes rob my mother of her money, making it even more difficult for her to pay the bills. We often went for days without food and I would always complain about how hungry I was and when my next meal would be. When we did have food, my mother let me eat my fill and then when I was done she would eat what was left.

I was always a curious child and my mother would always say that curiosity killed the cat. I was always asking her questions and always talked about the outside world. And when I say the outside world, I mean the world right outside our cloudy apartment window. I didn't go to school because my mother couldn't afford it so I spent six out of seven days a week cooped up inside our stuffy apartment. On Sundays my mother would take me out for a walk but only for a short amount of time. The Triple Threats were always roaming the streets looking for their next victim so we never walked for more than a half hour. On Sundays my mother would also teach me how to read and write. I was a pretty bright kid so I picked up everything pretty quickly. Like my mother, I was a firebender. She tried to teach me the basics of firebending but I had a hard time learning everything. It was difficult for me to learn the forms and I always failed them, but she never gave up on me. Also, on Sunday nights before going to bed, she would always tell me stories of my father.

My father was a mixed breed like myself. His father was an earthbender and his mother was a waterbender. He inherited his mother's waterbending skills but inherited his father's fierce, emerald green Earth Kingdom eyes. He stood out from the rest of the waterbenders in the North Pole because of his unique eyes. He left the North Pole when he was twenty and came to Republic City looking for a more interesting life than the one that had been laid out for him in the Artic. After only a few weeks of living in Republic City, he met my mother who was only nineteen at the time and was working as a waitress in her parents' Fire Nation cuisine restaurant. They instantly fell for each other and dated for two years. They were inseparable and did everything with each other. My mother had told me that one night their love for each other became so passionate that she became pregnant with me. She had told my father the good news and he had cried tears of joy. He had taken my mother to the doctor for monthly checkups and when the doctor told them that I was going to be a girl, he cried once again saying that he had always wanted a daughter. When my mother was two months into her pregnancy she told her parents that she was having a baby. Instead of rejoicing that their daughter was starting a family and that they were going to be grandparents, they were disgraced and cursed her name for becoming pregnant without being married. They kicked her out of the house and no matter how many times she tried to return they threw her out and refused to talk to her. My mother went to go live with my father in his small apartment (which is the same apartment I grew up in with my mother) for four months. One day my mother woke up and found a note on the kitchen counter from my father. It read, I'm sorry for leaving but I'm just not ready for this yet. My mother fell to her knees and sobbed for days. She thought, what wasn't he ready for? A family? A marriage? Responsibilities? She never heard from him again yet she never stopped loving him. She forgives him for leaving but was distraught by the fact her youth was stolen from her so soon and that she was alone. The burden of raising a child as a single parent proved to be much too great since we lived impoverished lives.

My mother's impoverished life was her downfall. A week after my mother's thirty-first birthday, she fell horribly ill. She couldn't go to work and we couldn't afford a doctor to treat her. Her coughing fits got worse and worse, her fever elevated and she found it harder and harder to breathe. On her deathbed, she told me that she loved me and she told me to never do anything that would make people lose respect for me. I think about these words every day and in every decision I make. When my mother took her final breath I ran to try and find a doctor. Luckily, I found one that lived on the floor of our apartment. He looked over her dead body and said that her fever got so high that her body lost all control of maintaining a correct body temperature. She died because her core body temperature reached 107 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sensing that I could not afford a proper funeral and burial, the doctor grabbed a shovel and my mother's body and told me to follow him. It was about an hour walk to a clearing surrounded by trees outside of Republic City. The doctor asked me where I wanted the body and I pointed to the tallest tree. He walked to the foot of the tree and started digging my mother a grave. When he was finished he gently lowered my mother's cold body into the ground and began throwing the earth in back over her. The doctor broke his shovel in half and stuck the handle in the ground like a stake to mark my mother's grave. He collected rocks and made a pile of them around the stake. It began to thunder and the rain came down hard. The doctor bid his farewell and left me alone with my mother's grave. Only then did it hit me that I was now alone. I lifted my face toward the sky and began to cry. The rain and my tears washed down my face and soaked through my clothes to my skin. I screamed in anguish but even I could not hear my screams over the roar of the thunder.

Two weeks after my mother's death the landlord came looking for his payment on the apartment. I told him that I had no money to give him and he kicked me out on the street in a heartbeat. It was hard to find food and my meals almost always came from a dumpster or garbage can. I didn't know where to sleep and I didn't know where to call home. My first night on the streets I found a nice tree with low branches in a secluded part of Republic City Park. I climbed the tree and slept on the lowest branch in case I were to fall out of the tree while sleeping. That tree became my home for the next eight years. And little did I know that I would fit right in at night because about a fourth of Republic City's homeless population slept in the park every night.

When I was fifteen I landed my first job and my current job. I had tried hundreds of times to get a job before that but I was always denied because I was too young. I found a job working at a pet store downtown. I work five to six days a week and get paid twelve yuans a week. All of this money is spent solely on food since forty-eight yuans can't even buy you the worst apartment in the city. I usually eat six meals a week, spending about two yuans per meal. That's enough to buy you about one piece of fruit or one meat skewer. Of course, ever since I decided that I was going to go to the pro-bending championship match I had been saving up money skipping fifty meals over the course of seven months. It wasn't easy to go without that many meals but I saved up the 100 yuans needed to buy the ticket.