Katherine

When my brother and I drove away from the airport in Albany, New York, around 7 PM last Friday, we knew that we had a long trip ahead of us. It would take us approximately 16 hours to get to Nashville. We knew we would have to drive a fair distance that night if we didn’t want to hate ourselves the next day. We also knew that we weren’t that hungry, but that we would want to get dinner for later, when we would be hungry. What we didn’t know was that the food we were going to eat was going to ruin our lives and destroy our chances of finding love or fulfillment or even occasional inner peace.

We got burritos at the Chipotle in Albany because ADDICTION. (Also, hot Chipotle dude, consider this a MISSED CONNECTION from a HORNY TEEN. I was there. You were there. I looked at you. You talked to a co-worker. You went to the back of the restaurant and disappeared. Call me if ur interested ;) ) About an hour later, when we were hungry, we stopped to eat our dinners in the parking lot of a rest stop. Seats pushed back and in the reclining position, we ate every last bite of our giant burritos with gusto.

Twenty minutes later, we couldn’t move. We couldn’t laugh or talk too much because laughing hurt and talking was loud. We didn’t even want to talk about being horny. This NEVER happens. A few more minutes, and the air started to feel oppressively heavy. “THIS IS FOOD?!?!?! THIS is what keeps us going?!?!?!” I cried. We started to laugh, but it hurt so much that we stopped and curled into little balls. A few more minutes, and we drove a few yards to get closer to the building and ran inside to the bathrooms.

I spent a long time pooping and texting Davis. I was involuntarily whimpering when a maintenance woman came through, prompting her to ask if I was OK. “I think I’ll be fine,” I moaned. “Could you maybe turn the music down, though?” She said that she was sorry, but she couldn’t.

When I had been alone in the women’s bathroom for so long that the automatic lights had turned off, Davis came inside and went into the stall across from mine so that we could be miserable together. We talked about Britney Spears and the sickest we’d ever been and also swore off Chipotle. (Not that there was anything “wrong,” per se, with our food. I probably shouldn’t have eaten a whole giant burrito after a week of not eating very well at all.) We talked about how we were going to take better care of our own bodies and laughed when a Coldplay song came on.

We got to our hotel late that night. I came in hugging bottles of Gatorade, gingerale, and water, looking as pitiful as I felt. The next afternoon, we woke up, bought doughnuts for breakfast (whoops), and drove from noon Eastern Standard Time till 1AM Nashville time (12 hours total). In between, we flash-toured one of my prospective colleges, farted at each other, talked about crushes, talked about school, and went a little bit insane (I had a small breakdown at a gas station in Kentucky; Davis was exhausted and also kept threatening to murder me).

I don’t really think I learned anything from any of this, because learning things from experiences is not cool. I’ll probably take better care of my body, but only so much that I don’t experience anything similar to Chipotle-gate 2013. I also discovered that I am related to someone who will poop with me and snuggle with me in the same day, but I already suspected that. ♦