Begin by having coffee with it on a midsummer Saturday. That first taste will leave your lips tingling like an allergic reaction, like pit-viper venom, like a punch in the mouth. Acknowledge even then that what you feel is nothing more than an intricate manipulation of your brain chemistry: something about pleasure centers, and the bitter residue on your tongue making everything afterwards bland by comparison. Shudder when you realize that you like it anyway.
Leave the café. Don’t let the sweetener leave your mind. Imagine it sitting on your kitchen counter in the morning, how you might make a coffee for it before work, how it’d leave your lips raw with its scalding kiss. Wonder what it’d feel like to peel away its wrappings in your darkened pantry. Suck on your teeth to bring back its bitter, biting aftertaste. Tell yourself that you love it—that you love what it says about you that you can love it. Embrace the ticklish jolt of your sudden freefall.
Start seeing the sweetener everywhere: at restaurants, at parties, at your workplace cafeteria, at home clinging to your apron as you make travesties of old family recipes. Feed your obsession until the craving becomes almost painful; the binges, nauseatingly intense. More than once, wake up covered in its lingering smell—mouth and fingers sticky, head aching with a dopamine crash—and swear that you’ll cut yourself off. Then roll over in bed and see the lumps of it mounded under the sheets. Smile. Reach out. Pull it closer.
Ignore the accumulating side effects. Poor sleep. Generalized fatigue. Constant fear that the sweetener might suddenly harden overnight, or run out without warning, as it has already too many times for comfort. Gastrointestinal distress increasing in direct correlation to your dose, which itself has escalated exponentially and addictively. Soon, just seeing it will set your stomach roiling. Don’t let that stop you from grabbing handfuls of it at night, rolling in it until your body glimmers with its essence, tonguing it up after the inevitable breakfast in bed the next morning. You will spend more hours than you’d like curled up on the bathroom floor as a consequence, but how could you resist? The packaging is so pretty, and it makes such attractive noises when squeezed, belying the tasteless and gritty and toxic interior.
Show it off to your best friend. Watch their smile curdle from the poisonous aftertaste. They will suggest that this isn’t healthy, that it has all the warning signs, that it may even prove dangerous—you will insist that the sweetener benefits you, too, that you can work around its crystal-sharp edges and temperamental properties and corrosive touch, because it gives your life a marginal sweetness. Non-nutritive sweetness, your friend will argue. Exactly, you’ll say, ignoring the implications of that adjective, non-nutritive, definitionally incapable of helping you grow. Snuggle yourself in the sweetener’s likely deceptive labeling that it’s natural, nontoxic, even as those toxins build up in your body’s longest living cells: clouding your eyes’ lenses, crystalizing your cardiac muscles, staining your neurons an oily pinkish green.
Become weaker and sicker. Lose weight precipitously. Steadily take up less space. Continue living like this for weeks, probably months, maybe years, even decades.
Now—yes, now—wake up. Examine yourself in the bathroom mirror: skin splotchy, nails gnawed, sagging skin strung across brittle bones. Raise a hand to your hair—find it falling out in clumps. Blink your bloodshot, funereal eyes. Dare to question whether this dependency might not be natural, nontoxic. Prop yourself in the doorway—squint at the rotting confections you’ve made with your sweetener glimmering in the gas lighting in this display case of a home. Note your throat itching with the panic that precedes vomit, your body’s natural and ineffective instinct to purge something, everything, it.
Realize that you don’t like this artificial sweetener at all. Remember the delicious complexity life used to have: bitter, rich, sometimes truly sweet. Remind yourself that you could taste that again.
Grasp at the spark of hope sputtering in your chest.
Watching it die will prove crucial in solidifying these next, final steps.
Think about how much time you’ve invested in this passion. Consider the uncomfortable questions if you didn’t bring it to the next family holiday. Imagine the humiliation the next time you met with your best friend, and they squinted at your empty hands, and they asked where it’d gone.
Trudge back to the living room and couch yourself next to that sack of sweet nothingness. Let it fall onto you. Welcome its granules cutting into your raw lips and tongue. Don’t panic if its keeps you from speaking, or leaving. Savor the security of its gray sensory nonstimulation, the absence of an absence of flavor, so completely have you desensitized to its stale, manufactured sweetness.
Embrace once again that ticklish jolt of a freefall, down into the reward pathways carved into your mind, ruts turned to rifts turned to gaping abysses where you’ve become trapped, starving, no nourishment in sight. Tremble from the chilly white powder drifting down around you; squint at the unreachable hairline crack of sky up above; dare to hope that it’s snow, and catch some on your tongue, and gag at its fake, familiar taste. It is only the sweetener. Choking you. Crushing you. Burying you alive.