The Burrito Incident and Other Regrets
David Corwin had built his entire adult life around a simple philosophy: expect nothing, and you'll never be disappointed. It was, he liked to think, a kind of emotional budgeting—the same principle that governed his 401(k) contributions and his approach to Tinder. Modest inputs, modest outputs, no wild swings in either direction. At thirty-four, he had achieved a life so perfectly balanced in its mediocrity that an accountant might have wept with professional admiration.
He was thinking about this, more or less, as he sat in the fourth hour of what should have been a twenty-minute drive home, wedged between a delivery van and a Prius with a bumper sticker that said HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS, which nobody had done, because nobody in Route 9 traffic loved anything at 6:47 PM on a Tuesday.
In his right hand, balanced with the delicate precision of a bomb disposal expert, was a gas station burrito. It had been sitting under a heat lamp for an indeterminate span of time—long enough that the tortilla had achieved a texture somewhere between leather and regret—and he had bought it anyway, because the alternative was going home to an empty apartment and making himself something that…
