life as a chocolate cake

Have you ever met a word that sounds similar in some many languages, or at least in the languages that use Latin alphabet? For example, I can just easily read the following: Danish - chokolade, Dutch - chocolade, English - chocolate, French - chocolat, German - schokolade, Greek - σοκολάτα, Italian - cioccolata, Romanian-ciocolata. Sorry, I made an honest mistake, Greek doesn't quite use the Latin alphabet, but from what I can decipher, it sounds in free translation like: sokolata. I admit Greeks have a very fancy way of writing letters.

With that being said and out of the Havelingvistic way, let’s start a more serious discussion about chocolate’s etymology, that apparently stems from an aztec word ‘’xocoatl’’, a bitter drink brewed from cocoa beans. But, I am not here to lecture about chocolate and its origin, or how it was first produced, when it got to be produced on an industrial scale, what's the most renowned chocolate brand in the world, how many types of chocolate exist, or how chocolate is a cultural landmark and so on.

I am here to argue that chocolate can literally and figuratively touch your heart. Literally, because it has been proven scientifically that chocolate, especially dark chocolate, contains antioxidants that fortifies your heart. Figuratively, chocolate touches everyone’s heart, because someone extremely wise said: life is like a box of chocolate. I guess that person also had a sweet tooth, maybe was hungry when came up with this phrase, because, from my point of view, life is not a box of chocolate, life is either a box of sweet, creamy, velvety chocolate, maybe sometimes even in flavours, like brandy, cognac or life is a box of dark, bitter, no flavor chocolate.

And, if life is metaphorically a box of chocolate, I would have preferred that mine to be like a chocolate fountain, chocolate cascading rhythmically up and down, blessing the eyes with a warm pleasant rich color. What a beautiful sweet life would have been. Or, at least, like a piece of chocolate cake. Instead, life had nothing to do with any of these.

Life was like a big chocolate cake from which I got only crumbs. As a child, I managed to lick my lips to keep the taste of sweetness longer. Though, even the taste eventually faded away, the memory of it, the desire to retaste it, the perseverance to get at least a full slice of chocolate cake made me stoic and resilient when it came to life challenges. Stubbornly, I never gave up my dream, no matter how unlivable life became. Since I couldn’t have the slice of chocolate cake, I would have been content to at least have some substitutes: chocolate-filled strawberries, chocolate candy, a cup of hot chocolate, a chocolate cookie with a cup of cappuccino. That was when I was a teenager. But, even if I lowered my standard, chocolate remained out of reach. It was as if the strawberries were too rotten to be passed through the liquid chocolate, as if I dropped the candy in the gutter while I was opening the wrapper, or the hot chocolate was too hot to drink it. As a mature person, I became myself a piece of bitter chocolate. I got disappointed in everything and everyone.

In other words, the taste of crumbs have been ephemeral. Chocolate has touched my heart destructively, didn’t fortify it as it was supposed to, on the contrary, it weakened my heart.

Maybe, if we all perceive life as a box of chocolate, and understand that there is such a variety of sizes, kinds and flavours, that if we open a box, each of us is entitled to a bar or if humankind is like a big chocolate cake we all have to share, maybe life and chocolate will intermingle harmoniously.