Reese's Big Cup Marshmallow

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Middle school is a jungle and a prison mashed together.

Remember when it would be lunchtime, and you’d sit in the school cafeteria as life drained from your eyes?

Remember how you’d have just been in history class learning about ancient Egypt and how your fellow classmates would use the lunch period as a pressure-release valve. The buzz would be so thick it felt like it surrounded you, brushed against you, like Nile River reeds.

You’d stare at a tray of Salisbury steak that looked like it was buried deeper in questionable gravy than a pharaoh’s remains under a pyramid, and just as much like a corpse.

Remember how your teacher used some kind of enchanted school bus to take your class to ancient Egypt on a field trip that didn’t seem to require permission slips, and it was equal parts terrifying and thrilling.

Remember how you walked through the temple of Imhotep, watched an embalming from the shadows, and hid while one of your classmates got chased by palace guards.

Sure, your class rushed to the bus with one less student, but you were brought back to school as if none of that happened. You were only 12, how were you expected to adjust to a magic field trip?

Your classmates seemed to do so easily… or did they?

The next day one kid would be swinging from a light fixture, another would be chased by a teacher with a net.

A group of kids huddled and whispered machinations in preparation to start a food fight the likes of which only seemed to happen in '80s movies.

They acted like jackals, just trying to find some outlet for their pent-up energy and imaginations, trying to find some control in a world that had just grown bigger in a way even adults would struggle to adjust to.

Remember how you felt small and overwhelmed.

One of the few things you did have control over in school was the post-lunch snack you brought.

If only you had Reese's Peanut Butter Cups limited-edition Big Cup version with marshmallow that day.

The ancient Egyptians used marshmallow, or at least its progenitor, as medicine, treating things like sore throats and inflammation. It was also a luxury treat.

One item, two different uses.

Creative. Inspiring.

Words you wish you could have used to describe middle school instead of ‘humiliating’ or ‘awkward.’

Biting into a delicious mix of chocolate, peanut butter, and fluffy marshmallow is like biting into a memory.

A memory like when you snuck away during your field trip and met that priest named Nekheb who, under domineering pale moonlight in the courtyard of the Shrine of Osiris, showed you the ritual to get Osiris to curse the crops of the Hittites.

And it worked.

Nekheb, too, felt small and powerless in a quickly growing kingdom where might was revered and meekness left you forgotten with the dust of history.

But using creativity and inspiration, the enemies of the kingdom suffered at Nekheb's hand, and he shared a marshmallow treat with you afterward.

It might feel like there are as many years between Nekheb and you as there are grains of sand in the desert, but you were more connected than you know.

You were both human, you were both creative, and you both deserve to enjoy your marshmallow treat amidst the chaos.

And if you keep at it, you too can master that ritual of the gods.

Though it may only work on Hittites.

Connect to a memory, connect to the ancients, connect with a Reese's Big Cup Marshmallow.

Osiris would like it.