Pennsylvania transforms at night, morphing into something that makes your heart lodge into your throat. You are seventeen. You are driving down Route 3, bleeding all over your beautiful leather seats, chewing away at your cuticles. Pennsylvania is something different at night. You miss this place that you’ve never even left yet. You are seventeen and nothing really all that bad has ever happened to you beyond your own self. Your life has not ended.

You never really thought of yourself as American until you went away, and now you see just how much of your life drips with the rotting remnants of Americana. You will always love this place. You love drive in fast food chains and going 60 in a 35 and sparklers that burn your fingertips and the way the ocean tastes different here and the never-ending highways through hell. You know how ugly this place can be. All it does is make you miss the beauty more. You’ll never get used to it, the way you can still love this place after it all.

Menal Siddiqui is a 23-year-old Pakistani-American with a master’s in Clinical Psychotherapy from King’s College London and a bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Barnard College. Previous work has been published in Papaya Press’s Tell Me About the Dream Poetry Inspired by the Work of Richard Siken.