Ode to the Frozen Chocolate Bar in my Freezer

Ode to the Frozen Chocolate Bar in my Freezer

Oh Frozen Chocolate Bar,

Oh, my beshert! My one intended love!

Drawn to each other for my desperate extrovert's need to mentally escape and your need to have someone say smugly about you, “It’s dark chocolate.”

Frozen Chocolate Bar,

I seek you for solace when my son answers every question with the terse, “Fartsauce.”

“Please answer my question!” I bellow to him in frustration, only to be met once again with his annoying rejoinder.

I am left wordless, wondering if “Fartsauce” has a deeper meaning and if he, a nine-year-old, is trying to tell me something in the only language he has available. “What does ‘Fartsauce’ mean?”I ask at dinner in a “We can talk about this” voice. I am met with laughter, milk shooting out his nostrils. They will laugh about this forever. The time Mom tried to get to the bottom of “Fartsauce”.

Oh Frozen Chocolate Bar,

Transport me! Deliver me when my husband Canadiansplains hockey history to me.

How could Wayne Gretzky come up so frequently in a marriage 21 years after he retired?

Does Wayne know about us? Does he feel drawn to northern Virginia?

Does he think about us so frequently even though we’ve never met? Will this end in an indie film where he is obsessed with us and we with him and then one day we meet and it’s all one big let down meant to indicate the meaninglessness of existence? 

Oh Frozen Chocolate Bar,

Restore my compassion! Fill me with patience when my daughter declares the injustice of being forced to clean her own dirty bathroom.

Woe unto the matriarch--apparently the only household member able to see dirty surfaces. Why must I be the keeper of the clean? Why can’t the others wipe out their toothpaste globules stuck to the side of the sink? Do they like the misty reflection of their dirty mirror? 

Oh Frozen Chocolate Bar,

With you I am a singular entity, buying “the good” cottage cheese and not skimping out on generic or “forgetting it” altogether.

With each bite I can buy a pink velvet sofa for my own goddamn house.

A chew of chocolate and I am entering any room in my home without first having to pick up others’ discarded socks. Why is there a cemetery of socks in every room!?!

Oh Frozen Chocolate Bar,

I hide you behind frozen squash to ensure no one in my family finds you. Squash is like kryptonite to them--they cannot even look at it!

I am drawn to you, constantly, until the jagged edges I’ve decided need rounding have been nibbled to nothing and you are but a fraction of what you once were. The bar I intended to last all week has disappeared in only a day.

Oh Frozen Chocolate Bar! Oh! No! You are gone and I am forced to shovel other snacks into my mouth to cope with the quarantine. But they do not compare. And as soon as I can I will buy ten more of you--those tiny, expensive bars by the cash register at Trader Joe’s. And they will be filled with nuts so that my allergic family members can never take you away from me. And we can be together. Again.