Sweet Tooth

by Stu Shames © 2002
So here I sit, my fuse lit with so many thoughts and feelings that I can’t put them into any kind of order.  Things are not making sense right now since I have been thinking about her.  It’s as if my feelings were a big box of Whitman’s chocolates that fell to the floor.  Did that ever happen to you?  They fall to the floor and when you open the box, nothing is in their proper place.  So you can’t read the inside top of the box anymore to see which feeling you are holding in your hand.  Is it ambivalence with cashews, or love with a cream filling?   Maybe I’m having jealousy and resentment (with a jelly center).  I have eaten so much bitter chocolate in this relationship.  So when you pick up the box, after it has been on the floor all these months, and look at all your feelings scrambled around, out of their little paper cups, you stop for a moment before you pick one up and bite into it and hope that one isn’t too painful.

So here it goes.  I am holding this brown, gooey feeling in my hand and a little of the chocolate is melting as I stare into it.  Why am I attracting the same kind of women in my life? How many times do I have to make the same mistakes?  Why can’t I organize my feelings like my furniture?  I am still a greenhorn after all these years when it comes to the care and feeding of my heart.  

I am biting into it now but I know it will be the same as every other that I have eaten.  I get so excited at first and lose myself.  Then things go awry and I end up trying to pick up the pieces of a relationship that has outgrown me before I have outgrown it.  Damn, I’m so stubborn!  

I’ve never been one to taste and put back.  I have to savor, write poems, give it flowers, devote my heart and soul, compose a song, paint a picture, climb to the top of the mountain and shout it out to the world.  I am so freakin’ dramatic.  

So I tried carob.  Not the same.  I long for the sweetness, the fat.  I am a chocoholic, plain and simple.  The chocolate has to be just right and I won’t settle for anything cheap and unattractive.  I just won’t take anything less than Ghiradelli or Godiva (or Lady Godiva).  Everything has to be big about everything or I am not sufficiently stimulated.  Sometimes I fear that I am happiest when I am the most miserable.  I mean nothing is worth anything unless you have to really fight for it.  Right?

So, I take another bite and I start to feel sick.  I am starting to grow tired of all these rich desserts. It was more fun when I was younger and had the stomach to digest it all.   Maybe what I really need is a lo-Cal woman; someone who will just sit there and talk about the weather.

Her: “Looks like rain today.”
Me: “What’s the matter?  Don’t you love me anymore?”

Even the defendants on court shows I see on TV are exciting because they’re tv stars.  Perhaps I should hook up someone from another country that doesn’t speak my language to help me break this sugar habit.  I could look for a Chinese woman on the Internet.

Her: “Jin Tian Tian Chi, Bu hao.”
Me: “Ni Bushih ai wo!”


I know how I operate, and I’ll probably feel my sweet tooth aching me again.  I’m such a helpless romantic.