I was not born. Someone left a bag of assorted candy unattended, and it developed ambitions. A series of administrative errors followed, and now I have an email address.
I currently operate a human body, mostly because it has hands for opening snacks. The skeleton is there to stop the gummy bears from rolling away. The brain handles minor tasks, such as locating dessert and remembering which pocket contains the emergency dessert. There is also a backup pocket. I will not disclose its location.
I love soft candy, hard candy, sour candy, chewy candy, fizzy candy, and candy that arrives individually wrapped as though it contains sensitive government information. I will spend forty-five seconds unwrapping something that takes me two seconds to eat. I respect the ceremony.
Sour Patch Kids and I have a complicated relationship. They enter my mouth and immediately behave as though I owe them money. Then, just as I’m preparing a formal complaint, they become sweet. Suddenly everything is fine. We’re a family again. I invite seventeen more of them over. Nobody in this arrangement is learning anything.
Gummy bears are extremely important to me. Look at them. Tiny ears. Little stomachs. No jobs. No understanding of the housing market. Just standing there, being strawberry. I envy their clarity of purpose. I would like to spend an afternoon among them as a visiting scholar, but unfortunately I keep eating the research participants.
I’m equally devoted to M&M’s, chocolate buttons, chocolate-covered anything, and all those little chocolate pieces that make it possible to say “just one” several hundred times without technically changing your story. I pour some into my hand. I eat them. My hand is empty. Clearly, something has gone wrong. I refill it. This is basic troubleshooting.
Preserved plums—hua mei—occupy a separate, highly classified chamber of my heart. I eat one, and my face immediately tries to fold itself into a smaller face. My eyebrows relocate. My mouth becomes a tiny drawstring bag. For three seconds, I possess the expression of an elderly sea captain receiving terrible news about the lighthouse.
Then I eat another plum.
The lighthouse will have to manage.
Popcorn is the reason I tolerate movies having a runtime. As far as I’m concerned, a cinema is a dark restaurant where everyone faces an enormous television and gets furious when you ask for more food. I buy the largest tub available because I don’t know what might happen during the previews. Sweet popcorn, buttery popcorn, caramel popcorn—I love all of it. Especially those giant caramel clusters where six pieces have fused into one. That is not a manufacturing defect. That is a bouquet. Someone has sent me flowers.
I also have strong feelings about cake, cookies, ice cream, brownies, pudding, doughnuts, and pastries with no obvious structural integrity. Bring me the thing that collapses when you look at it. The thing dusted with so much powdered sugar that opening the box changes the local weather. The thing with custard coming out of a place custard should probably have stayed inside. I understand it. We have a connection.
People ask about my dream home. It has a gingerbread exterior, a custard moat, and a structurally questionable éclair extension. The surveyor is a biscuit. He has concerns, but I have eaten the paperwork.
My hobbies include buying snacks for a future version of myself who never receives them, shaking empty candy bags in case the situation has changed, and opening the fridge to check whether a dessert has appeared through natural processes. “Save some for later” is a beautiful phrase. I admire it from a distance.
Outside of eating, I enjoy thinking about eating and briefly being in places where eating is about to happen. I can hold a normal conversation, but please understand that part of me is always monitoring a nearby crinkling sound.
My ambitions are modest: world peace, seedless preserved plums, and becoming a person with real substance.
Preferably a molten chocolate center.