What makes me an addict.

Day after Halloween: We're sitting around the kitchen table inventorying candy and Lucas, sweet and generous boy that he is, gives me all of his Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I stack them up neatly. Then I pick one up. I bounce it once on my palm, feeling the weight. With just a small pull the glue comes undone at once and the paper folds open slowly on its own. I squint my eyes and bring the candy still in the package up to my nose. Easing the peanut butter cup out, the spent package falls. The crimped inner wrapper, the brown, cup-shaped one, is waxy. It holds to the chocolate but then gives all at once when you peel it away from the candy and falls, too, to the table.

The first bite, something like a vapor goes up into my brain, which lights up and then puts out the call that all the pleasure centers have been waiting for. I feel the endocrine rush. Synapses awash with feel-good chemicals. I want to laugh. Remember those York Peppermint Patty commercials? Hanging completely on the present moment there's no hurry and I stretch it out into three bites.

When I like something my whole body likes it. While it gets exhausting sometimes, keeping up with a reptile brain that's always hunting after the next blood rush, it's also a privilege to get so much out of a stupid piece of chocolate.