how many fun size candy bars can i fit in my cheeks

My mother, in her housecoat on a Sunday.
She is trying to quit smoking. She tears open a package of plain M&Ms and
pours them into her pocket, and it’s an ingenious idea. Candy on your person,
for any kind of emergency that occurs—nicotine craving or chocolate urge, need
for candy or desperate desire to replenish dangerously low sugar reserves.

My mother eventually quit smoking, and I am
sure the M&Ms cured her. As far as I know, she never poured candy in her
pockets again, but ever since then, I have thought about it. I have thought
about just carrying M&Ms and Goobers and Raisinets with me wherever I go. I
have considered lining the insides of all my coats with Hershey’s bars and
pouring hot cocoa in my shoes and padding my bra with Almond Joys.

I get a little worried when I realize
there’s no chocolate in the house. I get a little panicked when I think that I
have no access to something sweet, and no way to fix that. I get emotionally
fraught when there’s no candy at hand and no one wants to give any to me; when
it is offered, I sweep up huge armfuls like there is a candy shortage and the
person who gets the most stuffed inside their face wins.

My sense is that most people don’t have deep emotional attachments to sugar. No one understands candy the way I do. So probably you should all give it to me so that I can take care of it.

Or probably me and candy need to take a break. We need to step back and re-evaluate our relationship. Our terribly, terribly troubled relationship. Our desperate, desperately one-sided love affair that only leaves me feeling kind of like I have never met a vegetable and if I did it would give me the cut direct.

I kind of don’t want to do it any more. I don’t want to eat candy. I mean, I want to eat candy. I want to eat all the candy. I want to swim through a sea of Hershey’s Kisses and shower in a waterfall of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. I want my pockets to always be overflowing with Kit Kats and Nestle’s Crunches. I want the glorious bounty of bad chocolate to always be inside me.

But I also kind of need to maybe consider alternatives, like some of the candy instead of all of it. A portion instead of every. A soupcon instead of a steamroller-full. I don’t want to make it a new year’s revolution, I just want to kind of gently consider the possibility. To convince myself that yes, I’ll still be able to function? Yes, I will still be me. No, candy is not the only thing I can fit in my pockets. Yes, we will figure out a way to stuff them with ponies instead.