Prostitute finds love on the job

Trisha* has discovered a tenderness that outshines the harsh glow of the backroad lights, sending her heart racing faster than the cars roaring down Port Henderson Road in St Catherine.

Yet despite this new spark, the harsh reality of life on one of Jamaica's most notorious strips remains unchanged.

At 38, Trisha says she is only now learning what love feels like.

"You know, me take time now inna me age; I start to have a little feelings for somebody," she said.

As she spoke, her confidence softened. She paused frequently, as if carefully choosing her words, feeling her way through an emotion she had never fully named.

It was unfamiliar territory. Love, she explained, was never something she grew up with.

"I don't really know anything about love. When I was little mi never have nuh love. I grow around bare (mostly) man," Trisha told THE WEEKEND STAR. "It wasn't easy. Very struggling."

For most of her life, intimacy came with conditions. Feeling, she learnt early, was risky -- but survival was not.

That history makes her current relationship fragile and deliberate. The man she refers to, a former client, knows exactly what she does for a living. On the day of the interview, he had come to spend quiet, private time with her, even though she was on the job.

For Trisha, the relationship has not changed her need to work -- only how carefully she now protects what she feels. While love is new to her, she observes that other women on the street often go home to their lovers after a night of hustling. She even sought to justify their participation in the trade.

"A nuh everybody cut out to read and write, yuh know, because you have to understand that the vagina is God-given and we must use it."

The assumption that sex workers are untouched by love, she says, ignores how often they are forced to compartmentalise their lives and separate what is sold from what is felt.

"Love is out there for everyone, just like the world needs a little bit of everybody. We deserve love, too, but can the love pay my bills? The show must go on."

*name changed to protect identity