When I was little and we had jellybeans,
(everyone should mistrust stories that start out like this, normally, because they either evoke this air of starving gentility and Scarlett O'Hara beating her fists into the earth, or your grandma talking to you about something while you watch television most un-surreptitiously over her shoulder, in the days before you learn to appreciate things like that, but this story is actually nothing like that! It's good! Find out! Keep reading!)
I would pretend they were pills that I had to take, to cure whatever wasting Romantic Illness I had contracted. Mom says that any amount of actual medicine taken in such quantity would've been fatal in and of itself. I still maintain the potency of the pills was quite inadequate for the ferocity of my pains. And the bag of jellybeans or mini-eggs or fruit snacks would gradually flatten, and I'd run around outside for about five hours.
The weird thing is that these days, when I take my handful of actual weaponized pharmacologicals, I know my liver and spleen and whatever other gizzardy sweetmeats filter me out are rotting away inside under the chemical overload, and I still (sort of, somewhere, parenthetically) enjoy the takin' of the pills.
There is something too false about a confession like this - it feels TOO confessional, but (unlike a little girl who can't help spilling the beans about Mom's Christmas present stashed in the garage) contrived. But it's troooo.
(Now would be a good time to tell you I'm planning on printing this out and sending it to Post Secret. Damn. It isn't short and snappy and sloganified enough for that. Maybe with extra small font...)
The after-Easter jellybean sale will get me through this hard winter, and I'll never go without treatment again.