I was 20 years old, home from college for the summer, and I thought working the overnight shift at a 24-hour deli in New York would just be another exhausting job. I needed the money, and I kept telling myself I could handle the hours, the silence, and the kind of people who come in when the rest of the city is asleep. But little by little, that place started getting under my skin. It wasn't just fear.
It was the feeling that something in that deli already knew me before I understood what was happening. The nights got heavier, the hours got stranger, and I started feeling like I was stepping into something that had been waiting there long before I ever showed up. Even now, years later, when I think about that summer, what stays with me most is not what I saw, but how helpless I felt realizing I was no longer alone in that store.
I was 20 years old, home from college for the summer, and I thought working the overnight shift at a 24-hour deli in New York would just be another exhausting job. I needed the money, and I kept telling myself I could handle the hours, the silence, and the kind of people who come in when the rest of the city is asleep. But little by little, that place started getting under my skin. It wasn't just fear.
It was the feeling that something in that deli already knew me before I understood what was happening. The nights got heavier, the hours got stranger, and I started feeling like I was stepping into something that had been waiting there long before I ever showed up. Even now, years later, when I think about that summer, what stays with me most is not what I saw, but how helpless I felt realizing I was no longer alone in that store.