I was focused on the rain. Intent on being bothered.
Sour, cynical, serene.
It’s nice when the rain stops.
It’s nice when it's pouring down, too.
But there’s something sexy about city streets after a summer rain, right?
When you’re watching it all settle and evaporate.
The muggy, sweaty, steamy. Heat.
Just a half hour to close and the downpour had scared most people inside.
Everybody who had ducked for cover in the shop took this clear-skied reprieve to escape.
But others took it as their opportunity to venture out for that coffee they wanted an hour ago.
I had spent the last hour all but shutting down the store.
So, this would be fun.
It has taken a great deal of morphing and shaping and developing a skilled and practiced power to wield what I assume is my high functioning sociopathy to be effective at this job and never let them suck out my soul.
They want to.
They try to.
Their prying eyes.
Their noxious niceties.
“I hate to ask.”
“I hate to do this.”
“I hate to be the one.”
When they just don’t mean just.
And I won’t smile at their idiocy.
Or serve their entitlement.
They at look at me with their desperate, helpless eyes because I’m their mother and the veins in my breasts are bulging from the oversaturation of milk within them and they yearn to be fed, but they don’t know how to do it or say what they need and they beg me with nonsensical sounds and empty stares to shove my tit in between their teeth so that they can drain me for their nourishment, for their pleasure, for their survival.
For their maple spice.
And then when that little screen reminds them they should add a tip, they walk away and pretend they don’t notice.
So, my soul hides.
My self sinks deep within me.
I leave a shell.
A hint of what’s beneath.
But impenetrable.
“Enjoy,” I say.
It’s not robotic.
Not even meaningless.
It’s truth.
I care. About this thing I do.
And, for what it’s worth, I’m good at it.
So, they won’t take of me. They won’t know me. And I won’t know them.
But they won’t get nothing.
And they will want what they get again.
And I will leave everyday with the whole of myself.
Large iced mocha. Ew.
“Carlos.”
“Thanks.”
“Enjoy.”
His eyes.
Big and brown and earnest and curious.
Seeing me.
And the shell cracks.
And I’m smiling.
And I’m hating myself.
And I’m hating him.
“Hi.”
Ew.
But then.
“Hi.”
And I laugh. Why? I guess because all of me is here, suddenly.
And he’s pulled out into the semi-dark evening after-rain by his friends.
But he never stops looking at me.
And I watch him disappear with a corny, smirky, smutty summer lust.
And so it begins.