When my husband offered me the dark chocolate his friend had brought him from Paris, I wasn’t even tempted. I’d given up my favorite treat, because it triggered migraine, instantly, with the pain intensity in direct ascending correlation to the quality of the chocolate. At the time my husband offered it to me, that French chocolate was as appetizing as mud.
However.
Someone … somewhere … sometime … said something to me with ridicule in their voice. The details escape me; what remains is the heat in my face and the trembling of my lip. I wanted to climb into a hole.
There was no hole, but there was chocolate.
In the back of the cabinet, behind a jar of tomato sauce, under a package of ramen noodles, the candy bar lay in wait. The label read 65% cacao. Less than expected. 70% would definitely be deadly, but 65%, no problem.
A nibble would be safe. After all, it takes two simultaneous triggers to produce a migraine, and even if that chocolate were a trigger—which it probably was not—a tiny experimental bite would equal only one half of one trigger.
I slipped the prize from the wrapper, my mouth watering at the sight of the naked bar, cool and slick in my palm. Shiny as a new dime and scored into squares. I snapped off a square, carried My Precious to my writing room, and closed the door. Leaning against the door so my good sense couldn’t barge in, I broke the square in half and then broke the half in half. I placed the thumbnail-sized shard on my tongue like a tab of acid.
And then, it was gone.
I checked my hand to be sure I wasn’t still holding it.
It had slipped down my throat too fast to provide the tactile pleasure of chocolate melting in my mouth. Too fast to overpower the shame I was trying to outrun. Too fast to deserve the emotional logistics I’d committed to this exercise.
Still, I'd eaten chocolate without getting a migraine. I’d have to settle for that victory, as tiny as the shard.
I tossed the remains of the square on the desk and drove off on an errand. Seven minutes later, the migraine exploded. My skull squeezed down on my brain as my stomach lurched, and I struggled to see the road and remember the route home.
I’d have to take a pain-killer, and the insurance company only allotted nine each month to relieve the eighteen headaches I got each month, and now I’d have to take one for a headache I’d caused myself, but by the time I got home, I needed to take two, which left only three till the end of the month, still thirteen days away. Math intensified the migraine.
I collapsed into bed, waiting for the relief I did not deserve.
Stupid stupid stupid began to rise to my consciousness, but I had too little energy to fuel self criticism. Recrimination sank under its own weight.
I imagined the people whose poisons actually provided a couple hours relief—whether it be from chronic pain or chronic reality.
Here’s to us, who couldn’t say no. To Dawn who ate the candy she knew would split her skull, to the homeless man who bragged he’d get himself a beer with the money I gave him, to the mother on the 6:00 news who sneaked another OxyContin even though the court would take away her kids.
To all of us, I say, It’s okay, dear heart. We’ll try again.
However.
Someone … somewhere … sometime … said something to me with ridicule in their voice. The details escape me; what remains is the heat in my face and the trembling of my lip. I wanted to climb into a hole.
There was no hole, but there was chocolate.
In the back of the cabinet, behind a jar of tomato sauce, under a package of ramen noodles, the candy bar lay in wait. The label read 65% cacao. Less than expected. 70% would definitely be deadly, but 65%, no problem.
A nibble would be safe. After all, it takes two simultaneous triggers to produce a migraine, and even if that chocolate were a trigger—which it probably was not—a tiny experimental bite would equal only one half of one trigger.
I slipped the prize from the wrapper, my mouth watering at the sight of the naked bar, cool and slick in my palm. Shiny as a new dime and scored into squares. I snapped off a square, carried My Precious to my writing room, and closed the door. Leaning against the door so my good sense couldn’t barge in, I broke the square in half and then broke the half in half. I placed the thumbnail-sized shard on my tongue like a tab of acid.
And then, it was gone.
I checked my hand to be sure I wasn’t still holding it.
It had slipped down my throat too fast to provide the tactile pleasure of chocolate melting in my mouth. Too fast to overpower the shame I was trying to outrun. Too fast to deserve the emotional logistics I’d committed to this exercise.
Still, I'd eaten chocolate without getting a migraine. I’d have to settle for that victory, as tiny as the shard.
I tossed the remains of the square on the desk and drove off on an errand. Seven minutes later, the migraine exploded. My skull squeezed down on my brain as my stomach lurched, and I struggled to see the road and remember the route home.
I’d have to take a pain-killer, and the insurance company only allotted nine each month to relieve the eighteen headaches I got each month, and now I’d have to take one for a headache I’d caused myself, but by the time I got home, I needed to take two, which left only three till the end of the month, still thirteen days away. Math intensified the migraine.
I collapsed into bed, waiting for the relief I did not deserve.
Stupid stupid stupid began to rise to my consciousness, but I had too little energy to fuel self criticism. Recrimination sank under its own weight.
I imagined the people whose poisons actually provided a couple hours relief—whether it be from chronic pain or chronic reality.
Here’s to us, who couldn’t say no. To Dawn who ate the candy she knew would split her skull, to the homeless man who bragged he’d get himself a beer with the money I gave him, to the mother on the 6:00 news who sneaked another OxyContin even though the court would take away her kids.
To all of us, I say, It’s okay, dear heart. We’ll try again.
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