I had a cholcolate calculator once. It came in a box with a plastic see through front ... through the see through front you could see the perfect little chocolate imitation of a calculator. It was a combination of milk and white chocolate ... the different colours were used to detail the calculator ... buttons ... screen. It was beautiful. It was a christmas present. A stocking filler ... it was my favourite present.
I still don't know why I was so taken with it. I loved it. My brother Scott and my sister Emma also got the same chocolate calculator ... they devoured theirs without hesitation.
I kept the calculator in it's box. I kept that box inside another box ... the box it was kept in was full of sweets that I'd also got for christmas. They were little chewy sweets with little pictures of fruit on them. Since we were kids that didn't get sweet treats all that often ... I kept those too. I'd eat one every couple of days. What can I say? I was a very restrained child.
Christmas and New Year passed. Every couple of days I'd open the box eat one sweet ... look at my chocolate calculator and "oooh" and "ahhhh" at it's chocolatey calculatorey goodness. The box inside the box was kept in a box under my bed. I decided that once the christmas holidays were over I was going to take my chocolate calculator to school and show everyone. To me it was the most amazing thing ever created by man. It only seemed that everyone else should look upon it and gaze in open jawed wonder at the cocoa delight and piece of creative genius that was mine ... it belonged to me. It was the most prescious thing I owned.
I slowly waited upon the approach of January 7th ... the first day back at school. Around the 3rd of January I was slowly seized by the almost overwhelming urge to taste it ... nibble on a corner. Just to discover if it tasted as good as it looked. I had to stop taking it out to look at it ... the temptation was becoming a little too much. I went as far as banning myself from opening the sweety box it was kept in ... which meant I couldn't eat those sweets either. Sweet lord ... the torture! There is no describing the torture of resisting the pull of the chocolate calculator ... in all it's non functional calculator chocolate form!
The 7th of January arrived ... I got up and got dressed for school. I pulled the box from out of my bed. I lifted out the sweety box ... opened the sweety box. I looked lovingly upon the chocolate calculator box ... it was lying face down ... I was sure I hadn't left it that way ... I was overcome with a sense of foreboding ... my heart wasn't sure whether it wanted to stop or beat out of my chest.
Slowly I lifted and turned over the box ... looking up a me was the plastic packaging that was supposed to hold the chocolate calculator in place inside the box. The calculator was gone.
I didn't want to believe that it wasn't there ... perhaps it could have fallen out? Perhaps it could have escaped it's packaging somehow and fallen in besides the sweets in the sweety box ... it was possible ... wasn't it?
I picked up the sweets to look under them ... to see if my calculator was lurking somewhere underneath. No. It wasn't.
On touching the sweets I quickly discovered that they were sweet wrappers with no sweets inside ... other sweet wrappers had been deceptively rolled up and stuffed inside them to create the illusion that they were intact and still contained sweets. All my christmas sweets were gone ... my beloved chocolate calculator was gone.
My sister Emma was the culprit. She admitted that it was her. She ate them because she was hungry and had eaten her own sweets as soon as she'd got them at christmas. She's eaten every last one and then scoffed my chocolate calculator. I was heartbroken. At the tender age of eight ... I knew the pain of loss. Now I'm thirty two ... Emma still isn't sure whether she's forgiven or not. I'm not saying.
