Sugar.

Some people find candy corn disgusting. Some people hate it, find it cloying and flavorless and pointless. Some people hate cotton candy…

Some people find candy corn disgusting. Some people hate it, find it cloying and flavorless and pointless. Some people hate cotton candy. Some people hate the small crunchy marshmallows that come in boxes of Lucky Charms. Some people do not like dessert, cannot spend chunks of hours standing staring at pastry cases, confectioner’s cases, sugar sculptures, rows of chocolates on crisp wax paper. Some people do not trawl the cake and candy boards on Pinterest, moaning softly at the choicest offerings: cinnamon cider bars, mint chocolate chip bark, peanut butter cupcakes, birthday cake French toast. Some people have self control.

Not me. I can eat marzipan by the can, candy corn and cotton candy and butterscotch nibs by the bag. I can put spoons of brown sugar into my peanut butter and eat it as a meal. I can down chocolates, marshmallows, big pieces of dried candied ginger, dried pineapple, canned papaya slices in syrup, and chase it all with a chug of milk from the refrigerator, yum, and feel sustained, filled, refreshed.

My favorite sweets have always been the ones that don’t put any barrier between the consumer and the sugar. The kind of stuff that corrodes teeth and burns taste buds off while scorching the brain in a blaze of dopamine. I don’t need fancy flavors, cacao powder, carbohydrates or acidic balancing agents. I like rock candy, marshmallows both soft and hard, cotton candy, Irish potato candy thick with powdered sugar, toffees and nougats not covered by chocolate, icing, mini jawbreakers, jelly beans with crisp candy shells, and candy corn.

No. Not just candy corn. I prefer the round, bulbous candy corn pumpkins — Brach’s especially. Each has the circumference of a nickel, with a hardened molasses coating that gives way to melty, soft orange innards. On the top, there’s a crunchy green stem like a sickly nipple, which I always bite off first. I gnaw and gnaw at the things, ravenous, never sickened by the sweetness, sometimes dipping them in peanut butter to make the snack a bit more substantial. There have been days where I’ve eaten nothing else. Recent days. 26-year-old-woman-with-anemia days.

There have been Halloweens where I vowed to eat nothing but candy and succeeded. There are days when the excessive, cloying sweetness of Dunkin Donuts’ watery coffee carries me from dawn to dusk, and I think nothing of it. At times, I am tempted to take a spoon to the box of plain white granular sugar sitting in my cabinet. It is flavorless, gritty, bad for you, gross. I can dissolve it spoon by spoon, cut it with no other substance, love it, regret it only in the most abstract way. It takes days of eating like this before my body relents and craves broccoli, carrots, hummus.

I have always had a ravenous sweet tooth. A bad eater as a child, I loved chocolate milk, hot chocolate, cotton candy, Dum Dums. I would eat proper meals only to earn the right to some sugar. I was naturally thin and unconcerned with vanity. I didn’t think about calories or weight; I did not worry about how I looked as I dragged my teeth along the edges of Twizzlers, my eyes vacant, my tongue and belly bursting with simple syrupy glee.

On holidays, there was always a smorgasbord of sugary treats. My mom made pecan pie and brownies, sometimes fudge. There were cheesecakes, nut balls, date nut cakes, German chocolate cakes, and cookies. I’d pile my plate up with a sampling of each treat; my grandfather called it the “Triple de-Oinker Special”, or quadruple if I had four desserts on my plate instead of three. “Oinker” of course meaning pig. But I didn’t feel shamed by it.

Every Christmas season, my grandmother made hundreds of sugar cookies coated in crisp, hard icing that melted on the tongue. As children my sister and I spent hours decorating that massive mound of cookies, eating the burnt and broken specimens, licking icing from our spoons, covering each tree or star in icing, red and green sprinkles, red hots, the works. Our grandma kept the cookies on a platter in her kitchen, with big Tupperware containers of extra cookies in the garage. They lasted and lasted through every day of the season, as relatives came and went from my grandparents’ house. We always went home with freezer bags filled with leftover cookies, and ate every one.

I’m using the past tense, but that’s silly because it still happens. She still makes those cookies in preposterous bulk every year. All that’s changed is who decorates them (younger cousins do it, now), and how many of them I eat.

What happened was I grew up, I got braces, I hit puberty, I developed vanity and self-consciousness. I learned what calories are and became somewhat body dysmorphic. I vowed not to eat all day and then devoured whole boxes of Trix or Cap ‘n’ Crunch at night, standing in the closet. I started breaking apart cookies and eating small slivers of fudge instead of whole pieces, because then it didn’t “count”. I played DDR in exercise mode all evening until my energy expenditure matched my estimated sugar intake.

I was lucky for a girl, though; no one ever told me I was fat or discriminated against me for my size. My binge-purge cycle of fasting all day and stuffing my gullet with cereal and dried fruit at night never took me to a physically unhealthy place. In late adolescence, my brain just snapped and said “fuck this”, and I started eating and exercising without keeping track or hating myself. I gained a little weight back. I let myself eat meals. I still preferred to suck on gummy melon slices and inhale boxes of raisins, though.

I still do. My rampant sweet tooth is allayed only by my fear that sugar is toxic and that I will develop diabetes.

My love of sugar has long been dampened by this latter fear, at least since diabetes killed my dad. He was not your stereotypical Type 2 Diabetes sufferer, a fact that gives me irritated pause whenever people equate obesity and unwellness. He was thin most of his life, and very active, but still unhealthy. He worked in physical labor for the bulk of his life, loading and unloading trucks for Entemann’s bakery. He owned a small landscaping company and sweat all day pushing mowers, carrying weed wackers and leaf blowers, lifting machines out of the back of his truck. He had no family history of the condition. If you had seen him, you would have never suspected him of developing the disease.

But he drank Pepsi like water. My whole childhood he downed the stuff by the two-liter, sometimes multiple bottles per day. He ate Entemann’s cookies and cakes straight out of the box. Having access to free damaged boxes of cakes and cookies was one of the few perks of a job he found utterly loathsome and depressing. So he took advantage of that perk as much as he could. Sometimes he would accidentally-on-purpose damage a box of soft mini chocolate chip cookies so he could take them home. My sister loved the things. He loved them more.

Sugar makes you happy — for a time. I can understand why he did it. He hated his job, the drudgery and physical toll of it; in his dreams the piles of cakes, quickbreads, pies, and cookies were endless, floor to ceiling, and the work would never stop. There was nothing stimulating or fun about it. But there was sugar. When you’re sad or feeling dull-witted or understimulated, there is nothing like a burst of sweetness. It’s immensely comforting, and almost entertaining in a way. I have sat on the floor, blissed-out while devouring sweet food often enough to understand how he got in the habit.

He discovered his diabetes while driving home from a casino in West Virginia at night during a snow storm. It was the late nineties or the early aughts and he was visiting the casino on a semi-regular basis, always driving home at night. His eyes became blurry; the road disappeared. He tried to press on but had to pull over. He went to the hospital. They said his blood sugar was sky high, 300 and something I think; maybe more.

The whole texture of his life changed when the diabetes was discovered. It was near Christmas, and we had planned on buying him a cotton candy maker as a gift. It was my mom’s idea, but it was to be a present from my sister and me. Instead we gathered in the living room with the catalog open on the page where the machine was. It looked like a miniature of the cotton candy machines you see at the fair or at amusement parks, bright red and yellow piping around sterile metal. We told him about the gift and apologized that we couldn’t get it for him; you can’t buy a diabetic a cotton candy machine. He sobbed and sobbed.

Then came seminars. Equipment. Medicine. Training classes, which my mom attended alongside him. My dad took it less seriously. He was obsessed with the “cheat days” the doctor had granted him. You can have cake on your birthday, candy on Christmas — that was what the doctor had said. My dad asked about other holidays. He asked, how many cheat days per year? What about our birthdays, as well as his? What about the Fourth of July? How many days? Could he get ten? Couldn’t he just take more insulin on those days?

We started locking our treats in a faux wood cabinet in the dining room closet. Sometimes we hid our Oreos behind the microwave, with a box of napkins on top for extra protection. We knew our dad would come home from Entemann’s late at night, ravenous, and would tear through the kitchen looking for something sweet. If he found our snacks, he ate them. We complained and our mom worried and harangued him, but he did not stop. He guzzled Diet Pepsi and Coke Zero, but found none of it satisfactory. He tried sugar-free hard candies and detested them. It all fed the flames of his desire.

In time, it became too much to bear. He neglected the condition too much; he loved himself too little. My mom divorced him after trying her damndest, and he moved into a small apartment, and he ate whatever he wanted. He stopped checking his blood sugar.

The sugar killed him eventually. On his birthday the year that he died, my mom left a single can of Pepsi on top of his grave. Let me be clear: it wasn’t a fuck-you gesture, I know that; we were all still too raw and sad and shocked at what happened to think to be mad at him.

When she told me that she’d done it, the poignancy of her gesture was almost too much to handle. It reminded me of that Christmas with the cotton-candy maker. The thing that would be (or was) the death of him, sitting there just outside his reach, a symbol laden with our regrets. But we were the only ones that ever tried to keep the sugar from his reach. He never stayed his own hand.

So I watch myself, and temper my own desire for sugar. I curb my urge to sweeten coffee, tea, bowls of grape nuts, slices of strawberries. I eat apples and sip big chilly bottles of Crystal Light. I brush my teeth compulsively and chew sugar-free gum. I do not drink sweetened soft drinks, ever ever ever. I get exercise. I eat vegetables. I worry, but mostly in the abstract.

Food scientists and medical researchers claim that sugar consumption does not cause diabetes per se, but I am superstitious. Every time I feel a craving, every time my brain fogs up or I get a sugar high, every time I have to pee a lot — I worry. That I’ve inherited it somehow. It doesn’t matter that I don’t fit the profile — too young, too arbitrarily ‘healthy’. It doesn’t matter; I hypothesize and simulate panic.

I won’t make his mistake though; I won’t die for sweetness. But I fear the hunger for sugar will overtake me, and that I won’t master it until I’m sick. And then it will be a life of Splenda-sweetened hard candies and kale salads for me. Life will become colorless and flat. I will prick myself constantly with needles and experience nasty side effects — confusion, depression, sexual dysfunction. I will drink tons of water and pee a lot and wear an insulin pump under my shirt. My dreams will be filled with donuts and cocoa and sometimes I will patter into the kitchen and slip spoon upon spoon of sugar down my gullet.

Or maybe I won’t. Like the child of an alcoholic I am beset with urges that I have vowed to overcome, that I know are foolish, and that I have anyway. And it seems so harmless, letting tiny granules enter my body one sip of flavored coffee creamer at a time.

My sister’s boyfriend is diabetic. She pesters him about checking his blood sugar, and pierces his flesh with insulin injections. When I am home I watch him prick his skin from afar, compelled and repulsed as he presses a bead of blood onto the pale blue plastic strips, wanting to know my own number but too fearful to actually check. A few times I’ve told him to bring extra needles and test strips to the house, only to balk at the last minute. Fear of the pain, fear of the blood, fear of the truth. I kept saying I need to know, but I also kept avoiding it.

But I had my blood drawn a few weeks ago at the doctor’s office, for a battery of tests. I have been sick, with chills and fatigue, and a delirium that has lingered since last Valentine’s Day, the anniversary of my father’s death. For months I have been tired and sick and wasting away, and only now are my doctors beginning to crack the case. I don’t have enough red blood cells, though nobody knows why. In a recent spate of tests, I learned my blood sugar was 90. Below normal by just a hair. I have been eating candy corn pumpkins like a feral animal since.

Originally published at erikadprice.tumblr.com.