It saddened and angered me all at once, that I never knew the taste of real chocolate. Whenever the bouts of sadness came, the dull ache in my chest would return and the dark cloud would hang over me like an umbrella. And, when the anger came, my mood would become terrible. Of all the times I could’ve been born, of all the opportunities to come into existence, it was now, after Earth had suffered damages in the form of freak earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, wars and many more, that it was deemed fit that I be born. It had been a long long time since the last chocolate factory closed down, due to lack of the natural ingredient –cocoa. According to the old newspaper clippings I found and whenever I tried to search the internet, cocoa was now extinct. For a while, the factories struggled to produce artificial cocoa and other flavours. It was just nasty and left a wicked aftertaste and since no one would buy them, the factories just stopped trying to produce altogether.
I walked through the wooded part of our little community. We were living in a post-apocalyptic world, where the air was once recycled and the trees could be counted and the grass was a sickly brown colour. I’ve only seen how Earth was in all it’s former glory through pictures online. At least the Earth was healing and we still had the internet. Good times, right?
I caught a glint at the corner of my right eye. When the sun hit the spot just right, something glinted on the ground. Curious, I walked towards it and noticed it wasn’t a piece of jewelry as I had thought. It looked weird, like a piece of shiny paper. I tried to pick it up, but realized that more than half of the shiny paper was buried in the sand. I used my fingers as a shovel and dug through the dirt, unearthing the whole thing. I shook off the dirt and cleaned what was left with my hands. The silvery paper was stronger than normal paper and I turned it around. The other side was faded black and had red faded words– Mars. What was a Mars?
I took this shiny paper with words and went back home, washed it under a small tap with trickling water and looked at my small treasure. Later that night, with help from the internet, I found out that what I was holding, was a real life chocolate bar wrapper. Not the nasty type the factories produced – the real deal.
This was the most important moment in my entire seventeen years of living. I resisted the urge to lick the wrapper, thinking that I would still be able to taste the gooey goodness. I taped the chocolate wrapper on my wall and placed two fingers on my lips, kissed them and touched my treasure, as tears slipped down my eyes. Tears not only for chocolate, but for an Earth I never knew.
