Vachon Imagined

I love chocolate. Maybe a bit too much.

Not the fancy kind either. No artisanal, sea-salt, hand-foraged cacao situation. Just Hershey nuggets. The humble kind that pretend they’re innocent until you’ve had ten… or twenty.

One is never really the plan.

Last night I found myself in that familiar negotiation with myself: Do I have one more? Just one more?

And I always laugh at that phrase—“just one more”—as if it has ever been honest in human history.

People call it temptation. Maybe it is. But it also feels more like a small internal debate between two versions of me: one who has dignity, and one who has already opened the next wrapper.

And the funny thing is, when I keep going, I’m not really eating chocolate anymore. I’m chasing something.

A shift.

A feeling.

A tiny private escape hatch out of whatever is sitting underneath the day.

Excitement chasing excitement.

Comfort chasing disappearance.

At some point it stops being chocolate altogether and becomes a kind of emotional disappearing act with very good taste.

And I’ve noticed something: the line between pleasure and escape is very thin—and very persuasive.

Human beings do this in more elegant ways than chocolate, of course. We just happen to do it with better branding.

We call it craving. Or stress relief. Or “I deserved this.”

But underneath it is often the same movement: reaching for something outside ourselves to briefly become someone else.

And yet, somewhere in the middle of it all, there is a quieter possibility.

To actually taste what is here.

Not as a story.

Not as a reward or a problem.

Just as experience.

Chocolate as chocolate.

Desire as desire.

Presence as presence.

And strangely, that is where it stops being about control altogether.

Not because the craving disappears.

But because it is no longer being used as an escape from life.

Just life, moving.

And me—occasionally, joyfully—still negotiating with Hershey’s like it holds the secret to ultimate happiness.