The Territorial

When I first woke up, I thought I was dying. It wasn’t a dramatic thought, at least not at first.

I’d come to, groggy and stiff, with a strange sticky sensation on my hip and a smell that could have been sweet despair. For a moment, I thought the inevitable had arrived, and I was decomposing early, skipping the formalities.

Then I touched it.

My fingers came away brown. Smooth. Glossy. Not quite warm, not quite cold.

I stared at them, half expecting some cosmic message scrawled across my palm. Then the realization melted like a divine revelation on a hot day.

Chocolate.

Two perfect squares of dark chocolate, once whole, now obliterated in a slow-motion catastrophe inside my shorts pocket.

It took a minute for the relief to wash over me. I sat there, blinking, chuckling like a man who’s narrowly escaped a crisis brought on by confectionery.

I remembered the night before, standing in the kitchen, refrigerator light spilling across the floor, convincing myself that two pieces won’t hurt. Then, somehow, I must’ve tucked them away for later, a secret stash that never made it to the hiding place.

Buddy wandered in and sniffed suspiciously at my pants leg. He looked at me with the expression dogs reserve for when they know you’ve done something profoundly stupid, but they still love you anyway.

“Don’t judge me,” I told him, peeling a chocolate-flavored wrinkle from my pocket.

I shuffled to the bathroom and caught sight of myself in the mirror, bedhead like a crime scene, melted cocoa streaked across my hip, the dazed grin of a man reborn. For a second, I considered just throwing the shorts out. Then I figured they’d earned their place in history, a reminder that life’s real emergencies aren’t always as bad as they seem.

While scrubbing out the pocket, I thought about how easy it is to assume the worst when something feels off. A weird ache, a forgotten thought, a brown stain at dawn, and suddenly the imagination bolts straight to doom.

Maybe that’s just part of getting older: a mind that jumps to conclusions faster than the body can explain itself.

When the shorts were clean and the crisis averted, I got a cup of coffee and rescued another square of dark chocolate from the fridge, this time on purpose. I sat on the couch, eating the chocolate, and let the morning drift by with a satisfied sort of peace.

There’s something comforting about realizing your “new horrifying stage of life” is just poor snack management. I took a sip of coffee and smiled.

And if I ever do go in my sleep, I hope it’s after dessert.