Purloined Hershey Bars

There was an inside joke about me and Hershey bars at the rehab clinic.

The folklore around it was, when I was at Midway, my father had bought me a Hershey bar and I had stuffed it into the confines of my Kate Spade purse I’d bought from P’s shop.

I had found it one day, in a drugged up stupor, and proceeded to eat it with great ceremony after smoking several American Spirits in quick succession.

I was so pleased with my consumption of that Hershey bar, I began to crave them incessantly. And so, when I found my white hot anxiety about touching my phone had subsided, I decided to order some off of Amazon.

Only, I never pressed “order”.

And so, for weeks I’d walk around craving my Hershey bars and having no real way to get them. But then came the Easter egg hunt.

One evening, while I wandered around campus smoking my cigarettes and feeling blue, a friend from New York with merry white teeth, sparkling eyes, and a bad case of misophonia stopped me and shoved something into my hands.

“I’ve gone to the dark side!” she decreed (I’d been holding back tears all day);

When I looked down at my hands, I saw several small Hershey bars wrapped in pastel foil purloined from the Easter egg hunt.

I ate them whenever I was blue.

By the time my dispatch from the clinic came, I was stopped just as my father and I were packing up the car to move to the city where my sober living house was. I was paged at the front desk of the clinic.

“It’s perishable!” they chimed.

It was my large package of Hershey bars, like the bodegas order. I grinned and cried at once, melancholia and happiness nipping at the veins of my heart.