The Great Chocolate Deceit

in grade five, that momentous year where my Mother's schizophrenia held sway and domain over all

that year where my father was ejected and it was just me and my little brother with her

I got two large boxes of chocolate bars to sell

for the fundraising drive

over three weeks, we ate all of them

secretly, privately, pieces of some happiness, something aside from another day like this without end

without a mom or joy or anything to live for

and the day before I had to turn the money in, realizing the jig was up, realizing she was complicit too in the great Chocolate Deceit-

we sat around the kitchen table, counting up the panicky results of our scavenging throughout the house, HOURS of searching to yield:

-pennies, quarters, sometimes the odd valuable dollar 

almost, almost

we made it somehow (i think the lady in charge of taking the money at school took pity on me and let me through a few dollars short)

but that was the first moment, so young- where I began to feel a bone-dead exhaustion that would itself flourish and hold domain in times to come. 

it is the sigh of knowing, unutterably- that we were not enough on some fundamental level. that despite the love we’d somehow gotten the equation of happiness dead wrong. Or maybe never had it to begin with. How do you fix that? We never asked each other the question, although I know we asked it incessantly in private.

I still do.