angela townsend

Dear Peanut Butter Cups,

I apologize in advance for the unexpected correspondence. There is no emergency. You need not leap up from your neon orange bed.

You must be surprised to see my name on the return address label. We have not kept company in three decades. Our last date was Halloween before my Thanksgiving diagnosis, the day my pancreas bought the café and manhandled the menu. I was nine, and you were sweet, and that was that.

You know you were never my favorite. That would be the Kisses, those jaunty teardrops dressed for outer space. So, again: my apologies for this perplexing pink envelope.

I turn to you because, in the phylogenic tree of confections, you are the least likely to hurt me. You wear your carbohydrates on the outside, and you are generous with protein. You seem the type to cause a slow rise in blood sugar. So, stifle your giggle as I pose my question.

Do you believe God wants to use you?

Okay, you are laughing yourself into frosting, and I understand. I am asking a two-inch cocoa discus about vocation. I expect theology from milkfat and glucose. But track with me here.

Who else am I supposed to ask? I could fill aircraft carriers with pastors and professors. From the Sunday School flannelgraphs to graduate courses in Atonement Ethics, the hymn has been hardy: God intends to use us.

It made my elementary heart prance up and down the pews. God wanted to use me! At eight, this news came like a strand of Christmas lights around my neck. My looseleaf stories about polliwogs might bring Mrs. Connor joy. If I gave the sinusy boy with the half-inch bangs my gingersnap, he might believe God loved him. I wouldn’t get out from under my pink covers before praying, “use me, use me, use me, God!”

That was our last Halloween, Peanut Butter Cups, and you rode in the pumpkin around my steed’s neck. Do you remember? My mother fashioned a princess costume with an actual, ridable unicorn. Under my lilac crown, I smiled into candy-handing fathers’ eyes. I hoped God was galloping through me. I gave grim Jimmy, the youngest cynic, all my Tootsie Rolls.

God did use you. This is why I’m writing. You have purity of purpose. You are here to melt between teeth and tell true stories. You have been mass-produced to confirm that the fanged and bloody world is finally made of mercy. The same orb that erupts in war and aneurysms has given us senses that sink into peanut butter. The sweet will outlast everything. We know at eight. We lose it under layers by nine.

I did, anyway. The pediatrician made his proclamation, and my pancreas ascended the throne, and I became the princess of applesauce and first-generation “dietetic” candies. They were honest about their “potential laxative effect,” and I was earnest about doctors’ orders, and so the candy-coated world became a prayer of “use me, use me, use me.”

I asked my poet mother, that first night in the hospital, “why would God do this to me? I love God.”

She answered that every one of my days was written in God’s book before I was born, and we could trust that nothing happened outside God’s love. That was enough. I mapped the new neighborhood. I realized Type 1 diabetes was a hammer in God’s tool kit. I accepted the loss of Kisses and believed in great gain.

God could use me. God could open my empty mouth and make me a lighthouse. God could hand out lessons in gratitude through my skinny arms. I returned to school like a winged victory. I convinced the fourth grade and at least two administrators that diabetes was reason to rejoice. I comforted the afflicted and sang them New Kids on the Block songs. I passed around a yellow notebook I named The Happy Book. The elementary empire filled it with gladness: dandelion puffs and cancer-free fathers and Full House episodes and peanut butter cups.

Elderly churchwomen said I gave them courage. God used me. The principal said he “wanted to be like me when he grew up.” I cut off my hair, received a ginger cat for my birthday, and believed I was a girl on mission.

Spring came, and my family started crying.

Peanut Butter Cups, I don’t hold you responsible. But you were present, patient in the plastic pumpkin in the cupboard. My parents had “bought” you, and the Kisses and Kit-Kats and other weapons of mass dextrose, taking you off my hands and handing me a fifty-dollar bill with which to purchase unicorns. We laughed. We sang praises. Then we collapsed in the season best represented in The Happy Book.

My mother and father and I cried together. Our words were few. I knew my Daddy was crying for the nights when ketones kept me up until four. I was a soft and sobbing filling between my parents in the big bed, where their communion was a comfort but not a cure. My poet Mama was crying for the awful abracadabras, when my “freckles got weird” and she knew I was hurtling down the canyon. She gripped me with grappling hooks, pressing glucose tablets between my lips. I would fall again.

I was crying for you, Peanut Butter Cups, even though you weren’t my favorite. I was crying for the Sicilian struffoli my grandmother had stopped making out of solidarity. I was crying for how quickly my cheeks hurt when I caught myself smiling while others passed pies. I was crying for the smell of insulin, and the tiny tattoos accumulating on my fingertips, and the honest question from Petey Green, “so this is never going to get better?”

I was crying for distant decades, holding hands and dancing drunken like a spiral galaxy. I was only the princess of one small planet. I was not the sun. God wanted to use me. God wanted to use me and use all of this for all of my years. I was crying because I was so tired. Why would God do this to me? I loved God.

Dear Peanut Butter Cups, do you think God wanted to use me? I want to know how you feel about this. Do not tell my old seminary professors that I am turning to America’s most popular candy for theodicy.

I am turning to you because I agree with Kierkegaard, that frazzled Dane who seemed like the type to skip dessert. “Purity of heart,” he said, “is to will one thing.” Peanut Butter Cups, you are here for one reason. You are here to delight. God uses you. God feeds God’s children. God summons elements to speak of the sweet.

God speaks, and God’s words do not return void, but my hearing is as janky as my pancreas. I hear “God wants to use you,” and I get on my horse before the song is over. I hear “every day is written in God’s book,” and I stop reading. I find it useful to be useful.

And then, dear ridiculous Peanut Butter Cups, God uses you and renders me useless.

You remember. People in lab coats, white as corporate seraphs, convinced you to come down. You descended your sugary stairs while angels zipped up and down around you. You accepted a new mission in the No Sugar Added aisle. You felt generous and gave yourself away in both Milk and Dark varieties.

I sat on the linoleum, thirty-three years after my last Peanut Butter Cup. I tasted and saw that the Lord is good.

It was a throwaway moment, if such things exist, which they don’t. Who forgives God after a bite of maltitol? But then, I am the girl with The Happy Book. I cannot unbecome the upturned princess who claps for marigolds and my grandmother’s Shalimar and the new kid on the block. I want to be of use to the God who gives faster than I have time to write thank-you letters.

But Peanut Butter Cups, God made me a child, not a tool.

I need to eat a piece of chocolate and remember that mercy is taller than merit. I need to watch my Father wait for my reaction while I open the carefully chosen gift. I need to cry and crawl and encourage absolutely no one and remember that I am little. I need to receive kisses. I need to not know why. I need there to not be a “why.”

Dear Peanut Butter Cups, there’s no need to respond. You’ve fulfilled your purpose. It’s up to me to be filled.