I was working at a local fast-food chain,
the only job in town to hire a nervous-looking teenager.
The hours were long, they bled into the midnights of June and July.
I could not drive yet, so when my manager,
A senile old man skinnier than the drinking straws that littered
the sticky kitchen floor finally let me go,
I would message my mother, and wait for her
to make the drive in the dark.
That fifteen-minute wait was spent outside in the sweet, suffocating
Summer air under a billboard that advertised some sort of pest control,
decorated grandly with a massive three-dimensional mosquito
which guarded the decimated parking lot it hung over.
I would look back down at the empty road,
leading not three minutes away from the house of an old friend, now a stranger,
and wondered if he thought of me at all.
These were the times after the death of my adolescence.
The times where I could feel my old shell hardening and cracking,
splitting open like the dry skin that Winter brings despite the mid-summer heat.
I was re-birthing and losing myself simultaneously,
losing something you can’t ever get back, can’t re-set the sun and recycle the moons.
It was in those minutes that my mother had not arrived
and I had not come back from the dead that the loneliness swallowed everything.
There was no one there, despite the silhouette of a sixteen-year-old, aging,
and a giant insect keeping watch over a moonlit building.