The Drive-Thru and the Dead

She sat in the Taco Bell parking lot for fourteen hours, facing the busiest intersection in town, and no one noticed she was dead.

You’d think someone would notice a body. But people were busy. There were Baja Blasts to acquire. Chalupas to weigh heavily. A six-car line at one in the morning doesn’t leave room for situational awareness. Who among us hasn’t eaten a Crunchwrap next to a corpse without realizing it?

I grew up in that town. If you wanted something open past ten and didn’t feel like making life choices under fluorescent Walmart lighting, you went to Taco Bell. That was the rule. It wasn’t written down, but it was understood, like trauma or the real ingredients of nacho cheese.

The woman who shot herself wasn’t a stranger to my brother’s friend. She was an aunt who mattered to him and meant nothing to the people who write the headlines. Her car sat there in the old Taco Bell lot, not the new angular one with LED mood lighting, for nearly a day before anyone registered she wasn’t moving. The sun rose. The breakfast shift ended. Lunch orders came and went. And she remained there, quiet, unbothered, decomposing in plain sight.

Eventually someone found her. I don’t know who. Maybe the lunch rush slowed. Maybe the smell tipped someone off. Or maybe her ghost got tired of waiting to be seen.

They tore that Taco Bell down not long after. Said it was “too old.” That’s how we process trauma now, not with therapy, but with demolition permits.

The last time I was there, it was three in the morning and I was trying to keep a grown man from crying because the world wouldn’t stop spinning. He’d driven my car into a ditch while drunk. It could still be driven out of that ditch.

Technically, I drove us home. He operated the passenger seat controls like a game show buzzer, up, down, recline, repeat, which I suppose was his way of disagreeing with gravity. He said the world was upside down. I didn’t argue. It probably was.

He told me the only thing that could fix it was a Doritos Locos Taco and a Baja Blast.

So, I drove him to Taco Bell, because at that point it was easier to treat existential collapse with synthetic nacho dust than to ask what was actually wrong. That was the shape of the relationship. Obedience dressed up as patience. Caregiving rebranded as survival.

He was sobbing by the time we reached the window. The girl handed us the bag and forgot the mild sauce. He screamed at me like I masterminded the omission. I stood there holding a paper sack of corporate comfort food while he yelled about betrayal and vomited on my shoes. Then he proposed.

Taco Bell has seen some shit.

You’d think the girl in the parking lot and I have nothing in common. I didn’t shoot myself. I survived. I’m still here. But if you rewind just a bit, to the part where you’re parked under a flickering streetlamp wondering if the shape of your life is going to stay like this forever, the distance shrinks. You see yourself riding shotgun in someone else’s spiral and think, This is it. This is the story no one will ever ask about.

We don’t always die when we disappear. Sometimes we keep handing over the debit card, pretending it’s fine.

They built a new Taco Bell.

That’s what we do here. When something horrifying happens, we remodel. We knock down the walls, repaint the horror, and install LED menu boards to reflect the grief right off the plexiglass.

The old building had warped floors, flickering bulbs, and tile that always looked vaguely sticky even after the lavender bleach mop. It was depressing, but honest. The new one is sleek and vacant, with too much space between tables and too much silence between people. It looks like a bank. Or a church with worse acoustics.

But it’s clean, and that’s what matters. Clean enough that we can pretend nothing happened in that parking lot.

We choose erasure every time. Resolution takes effort. Repair takes honesty. Erasure takes nothing.

You can die in public here and still be invisible. You can scream, cry, or go completely still, and as long as you don’t block the drive thru, no one asks if you’re okay.

We recognize hunger when it’s for food. We’re terrible at recognizing the other kinds. Safety. Exit. One moment of being seen before it’s too late.

They say she chose Taco Bell because it was quiet. Or familiar. Or close. I don’t think she chose it at all. I think it was simply where she ran out of places to go.

That’s what guts me. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It wasn’t even hidden. She didn’t drive into the woods or park under stars. She stopped under a streetlight at the edge of a town full of people too tired, too distracted, or too busy unwrapping chalupas to notice she was dying.

And the thing is, we built the whole country this way. Giant glowing signs, twenty-four-hour service, and an unspoken rule that no one should make a scene. The world keeps turning, Crunchwraps keep melting, and the girl in the car becomes a rumor paved over with a new logo and fresh stucco.

Sometimes I drive by the new Taco Bell and try to remember where she parked. The layout’s different, but I can feel it, the coordinates still exist just beneath the surface. The pavement is smoother, the lighting upgraded, but the shape of what happened hasn’t changed.

She was there, and then she wasn’t. And we let that happen. Not in a dramatic way, just in the usual American way, where we don’t look long enough to understand what we’re seeing.

It’s not a mystery. This is a country where people bring their pain to the nearest open sign and hope it’ll take them in. Churches, bars, fast food joints, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s lit. That someone’s technically open. That you can sit in the glow and pretend help is coming.

But no one came. They built a new building and called it progress.

I’ve thought about leaving flowers. Writing a poem. Something. But I don’t know her name. And at this point it feels insulting, like lighting a candle for a house already flipped by a real estate developer.

So, I do the only thing I can. I remember her each time I see that glowing sign. I wonder if anyone looked her in the eye that week. I think about how many people sat beside her in line and had no idea she was already halfway gone.

And I think about all the times I almost parked there too.