Chocolate Cured My Cough
Mossy (or what my throat looked like on the inside, today) by Asher Jay
January 2 2019
Three days ago a fleshy flu incubating petri dish, also known as a toddler, seated beside me on the Metro North managed to completely dismantle my immune system and result in a force quit of all my internal programs within an hour of contact. The next day I was rendered as unproductive as the Oval Office and as discombobulated as Theresa May’s handling of Brexit.
Swaddled in blankets, sipping on piping hot homemade elixirs (each serving an unpredictable proportion of honey, lemon and ginger) I noticed my inner square footage slowly getting usurped by mucus, at that moment I realized it was only a matter of time before an army of microbial miscreants colonized my blood stream, raped my antibodies and pillaged my white blood cells. Ofcourse, this knowledge as well as the last of my motor function was quickly relinquished to NyQuil’s ability to tumble one’s grasp on reality down the rabbit hole. Morpheus was right, be careful when you take the blue pill, side effects include the mirror turning into a sink hole that you Alice into.
Before I knew it, the calendar read Thursday and the clock, two in the afternoon, and my sole contribution toward a working week day had been a drool stain on my Egyptian Cotton pillowcase that vaguely resembled an avocado. My diligent intern was by such time hard at work on my project, a project I had not been awake to give her updates of a direction shift on, consequently she was doing a task that was entirely moot. Meanwhile I was drifting in and out of consciousness, failing her work ethic, missing calls, and to my chagrin an important lunch meeting that had taken many attempts to schedule, a lunch that began a half hour ago that the other party had turned up for and emailed me from. I was mortified as I replied weakly, “I am mortified to note you are there and I am not. I am horribly ill. Albeit this is a weak response please let me know when you can reschedule and how I can make this right, I simply hate that I took your time for granted, I know we are only separated by eight blocks but that seems to be restraining order needed to contain my ailment. Sent from the sick bed, I nearly signed it off with “Yours truly, a slimy secreting supine slug” but determined it would be a visual picture I could never walk away from, one that might further compel a sense of character onto my brand.
My brand had already contracted a bug and a sense of humor, the prior was now showing up as a 404 error across Manhattan, my domain and the world, the latter was rippling into my professional sick day correspondences. I was doomed. There was little to be done. I turned to the ceiling, but NyQuil prevented me from being Aristotle and I fell asleep again. Friday went by in a bout of soul eviscerating coughs that left me sounding like an old Italian mob boss by Saturday morning. Saturday was spent searching for the soul that I had expectorated the previous day, given literature, I felt I might discover it in an uninteresting bowl of Chicken Noodle soup. I didn’t. It was too bland, or I had lost my taste buds to the cold, along with my will to live. It wasn’t until Sunday that I stumbled upon a curious new cure. A friend helpfully sent me an article that validated my profuse chocolate consumption, the only thing my tongue seemed to pick up on since I had been smote down in my prime. I had been shoveling chocolate in all manner of form into my system over the course of my illness to feel better, figured if it was going to work for Potter in Prisoner of Azkarban it could do the trick for me too, and rid me of my own harem of dementors. The piece alleged it was not a snake oil hypothetical, but a legitimate way to suppress one’s predisposition to spew a lung. All I had to do was pop in and intently savor on some Ghiradelli dark chocolate and wait for it melt over my tongue and slowly drip back my throat. Doctors’ research findings show that it works better than Codeine at coating one’s tickled trachea. Personally, I believe chocolate suppresses coughs by coating ravaged nerves in my throat with the sacrificed carcasses of miniature Oompa Loompas but that could just be the NyQuil talking.