2026-01-20 Freewrite

I mostly just wait to eat until I get hungry enough that there’s no other option. My family thinks I’m strange skipping lunch. An old girlfriend thought I was hiding something from her, that it was a guilt thing where the secret was almost eating me or something like that, something I imagine she had worked out with her therapist. We broke up for other reasons, though. (Her secrets.)

But it’s not like I’m fasting. I’m not some kind of spiritual hermit committing penance or anything. I’m just not hungry, usually. But I am now – hungry, I mean – though I’m involved enough in the middle of writing this that I’m not ready to eat quite yet. I have some leftovers in the fridge from Thanksgiving, or the meal-prepped soup I froze in those little rectangular rubber containers that I found online and which were delivered to my doorstep the next morning.

I have been in this room for days. I have enough food prepared in my freezer to last until Judgement Day, essentially. I bought one of those freezer chests along the far wall with enough capacity for a few weeks of pre-cooked meals. Once every few months I buy a half beef and end up with some ungodly amount of cow in there, and the big bag of white rice in the bottom cabinet is a better part of my body weight.

Everything feels impossible. Warming up the stove top, impossible. Ordering food, too many options. I may just waste away and have sleep for dinner.

No. I want a burrito.

There was a point in time where my laziness about the whole eating thing was overcome by my disdain of sitting in this room for too long – the two have clearly since changed places – and during that time my daily break from work would be to walk down the stairs, out the apartment building’s back entrance, across the parking lot of the dilapidated grocery store, and get a Regular Al Pastor Burrito With Everything, Spicy Salsa, Thank You from the burrito place across the street, along with a can of Dr. Pepper. Burrito order to the tall, severe-eyed bald gentleman behind the griddle who I gathered was Ecuadorian and then repeating Regular Burrito And Can I Also Get a Dr. Pepper, Please? to the young cashier with the white shirt, blue apron, and piercing brown eyes and black hair with subtle brown highlights. This whole thing was my daily ritual, even most weekends when I wasn’t working but was otherwise being a wastoid and preparing myself for the weekend evenings when I’d take a few edibles and pretend they were some kind of psycho-spiritual experience, doing a whole ceremony in preparation for taking the damn things which is a whole other story that I won’t get into now. You would roll your eyes at the whole thing, I promise.

The burritos were the real draw. I swear. They had this little bit of char on the pork, the tomatillo salsa the perfect level of spicy, you get the idea. Describing food seems such a waste of breath – you just gotta go sometime.

But I do wonder too if the cashier still remembers me. Hell, I wonder if she’s still even there. I never really asked how old she was. Never even asked her her name, nor her mine. I always feel weird asking store staff their names or reading it from their name tags. It’s too personal or something. I wouldn’t want a stranger calling me out like that. Gross. But yeah I wonder if she would remember me. After a few weeks she caught on that I always got the same thing, that I’d always get the Dr. Pepper and so she’d have already pulled it out of the fridge and had my total ready on the card terminal even before I said anything. She even one time just asked how I was doing. I don’t remember what I said but clearly it was weird since she never said it again.

Damn it’s starting to get late. I think that place is open pretty late, but I don’t want to be the guy throwing in orders right before closing. Honestly I don’t even know if she’ll remember me. The Ecuadorian cook never gave off that he thought of me at all, despite being surely the most consistent guest for that two-and-a-quarter year run we had. I think it’ll be weird to go back after all this time. I wonder if she’ll say anything.

I stopped going for I don’t remember what reason. I think it had something to do with how she asked that one time how I was doing and I probably just said Fine How Are You? and that was the end of it. I always gathered she saw me differently after that. She still looked me in the eye – she always had – but from then on it was just a Hey and I’d say Hey There and then I’d pay and be on my way, and it felt like she had reached out to me to break through that barrier somehow, that divide that exists when someone is working a job where you sort of stop seeing them as a person and see them more like a checkout machine where there’s a goal and the goal is to abide by this contract where I pay and get my food and then go, and she reached through and offered her hand it was as if I had in that moment turned away from her. I’m probably reading too much into this, as you can tell, but it felt like I wounded her in that moment. That’s not what I meant to do, of course. To be honest, I always had a bit of a crush on her. Not in any real way. It’s not like I knew her. But her hair had a bit of a wave in a way I liked, and her voice was cool and charming, soft and almost kind of raspy in a way that I found sweet. So it’s not like I wanted to turn her away. It’s just that I wanted to get my food and go, in that moment, that standing in line at the burrito place didn’t really feel like the Time and Place for Contact, right? There were people behind me in line and I felt like I was holding them up and I knew from listening as I walked away that she certainly didn’t ask how they were doing at all and I felt like having some kind of connection with the cashier was a strange special connection that I was almost imposing onto anyone in earshot. I did the same thing at coffee shops, you know. I stop going to coffee shops as soon as the barista remembers my name. We’ve become too familiar, then.

God damn, is it that late already? Jesus. I wonder if she’ll mention it, the absence I mean. I didn’t stop going back because of that or anything. I didn’t really stop going back for any specific reason at all. I mostly just stopped feeling like it. It got expensive, too. I mean, fifteen dollars for a burrito is pretty nuts. And so I started figuring out how to make stuff at home, and got pretty good at it besides. But if she does mention it, what does one say to that? I’m sorry for leaving you. How romantic. I don’t think I’ll figure it out sitting in this room. Just let me find my shoes and we’ll be on our way.

Ah, okay, there we go. I have at least the few minutes’ walk to figure it out, what she might say and all that. She could say nothing. I hope she says nothing. I hope I can go in and get my food and feel the steam from that huge spatula-full of marinated pork on the griddle and I can see what earrings she’s wearing today, maybe those dangly emerald ones that feel like Enough – who am I kidding. I hope she does say something, asks how I am. Lord knows I need a win. I just want to hear her voice. I hope it’s as smooth as I remember it. It’s easy to get lost like that in another person. Other people are so much easier to love. The messiness of their mind isn’t just hanging out there for all to see, the ugliness and the pettiness and the little hatreds that eat away inside. We don’t see those for everyone else. That’s why it can be so nice to just say Hey There and Thanks when the payment goes through. I wonder if this time I should say See You Tomorrow, give myself another reason to get out. Maybe she will be the one to say something, maybe she’ll ask if I’ll be back. Maybe she thinks of me too. Fuck, I better not mess this up. I’ll say a few words out loud on the way there. Get my vocal cords warmed up before I get in the door. Already have way across the parking lot, maybe I do a lap. Who the hell gets nervous ordering a burrito? And anyways it’s not like she thinks of me. What could someone know about me from my burrito order? It’s not a horoscope. She’ll probably just say “Eleven dollars and eighty-two cents” like always, or maybe it’s different with all the inflation hitting lately, and then I’ll pay and she’ll say Have a Good Night and I’ll say Thanks and her eyes will glaze over to the next customer, her brown eyes that come to think of it have that pretty ring of green around the iris, or at least I think so, or maybe I’m mixing them up with her earrings.

I’m already in the door. I didn’t even think of what to say. Shit, I can’t just stand here. Fuck. Yeah Can I Get A Regular Burrito, Al Pastor. Yeah With Everything, And The Spicy Salsa, Yeah. Hey, How’s It Going. Okay Cool. Thanks.