Mentally, I am a type of soldier. I eat two squares of dark chocolate everyday that I leave the house- four for stressful events. My consistent intake of chocolate occurs because of my necessity for order –quasi-OCD, or so people tell me. The specific type of dark chocolate that I eat, Lindt 70% cocoa, serves more for its ubiquity –What grocery store doesn’t have this?- and packaging: a shiny silver foil. Dark chocolate and its packaging reminded me of a bedtime story that I often read: “The Chocolate Soldier.” The Soldier stood in a seemingly protected store, wearing a shiny metallic uniform, an aesthetic face covering a vulnerable inside.

I’m clearly not shiny, but my nonchalance stood as my uniform. Beginning by accident when I stumbled across some in the pantry, my dark chocolate habits emerged out of anxiety over my indecisive future – typical amongst teenagers, but my friends had niche interests–, a pressure, a burning ray of sunlight in my protected store.

Like the Chocolate Soldier, I felt that I was melting, grasping for nonexistent connections. I tried using numerous rankings, projections, forum threads, and reading job descriptions to work backwards to find a subject that interested me and thus build myself around the occupation and vice versa -like assembling from a blueprint while trying to design the blueprint with materials. But I, along with the melted Solider, flowed into a drain, doing the minimum to receive good grades, becoming that chocolate fish to stay afloat. When the Chocolate Soldier approached the frying pan, I fell in a cycle of shifting to stay afloat -my fish kept melting and reforming, from actuary to optical engineer to quant to technical writer to diagnostic radiologist and on and on. Summer began, and I followed the Soldier: I melted and flowed into the pocket of the fisherman. But unlike the Soldier, who realized his state as a coin once he was passed from the fisherman to a boy, I saw myself as a coin when placed within a community of thirty-six intellectually gifted –why else would they want to do research?- students. My coin, my transportation back to my original store, my house, my mind. And I rose with the Soldier to the level surface, to those with similar aesthetic designs -or rather, in my case, just high school students-, with a transformed outlook: hold onto the leash to the origin, remember the coin.

Dark chocolate, and thereby “The Chocolate Soldier,” reminds me of my past self: a shifter. I couldn’t decide who I was because I didn’t need to be one person, but was what I needed to be –cliche? Of course. Using dark chocolate as a way of reminding me of when I wavered seems like a bittersweet comfort -literally and metaphorically. And that’s okay with me, since I like being realistic. Sometimes. Even when I seem ridiculous. But what’s my coin? Well, I’m just…odd.