A Brief Fictional Piece.

When Fawzi was a child, he had a massive sweet tooth. “The Cookie Monster,” his friends would affectionately call him. Anything with sugar in it was a treat for Fawzi. He loved chocolate and he loved candy, but, most of all, he simply loved chewing bubblegum. He could go through a whole pack in a day. His sister finally got tired of seeing all the gum wads in the trash, and decided to take action.

 “Did you know, Fawzi,” she said one day, “that if someone accidentally swallows gum, it gets trapped in their stomach forever?”

 This was a blatant lie, of course, but Fawzi was little, and prone to believe anything his big sister told him. Coincidentally, the next day, he accidentally swallowed some spearmint-flavored gum. Immediately, he thought about what his sister had said, and became terrified.

 What was once a source of joy to him had quickly become a source of anxiety and discomfort. He decided to go cold turkey on the gum, and eventually stopped consuming sweets entirely. By the time he reached young adulthood, he couldn’t even remember the name of his favorite brand of chewing gum.

 Fawzi was a very ambitious person, and out of all the myriad of career choices available to him, he eventually decided to become a dentist. He had always wanted to be successful. He ended up being very wealthy, but, at the same time, very unhappy—until, one day, an idea came to him.

 “What if I were to invent a special type of chewing gum, that can be safely swallowed after each use, and which has a flavor so distinctive that the taste never disappears?” he thought to himself.

 He told his family, friends, and co-workers about his idea, and none of them believed that it was possible. But he did.

 Fawzi had wealth, but not happiness, and he truly wanted both, and believed that they were not mutually exclusive—so he quit his job at the dental practice, and devoted all his time to working on his special, new brand of chewing gum, with the knowledge that this plan was not without risk.

 After several false starts, Fawzi’s gum was eventually ready for prime-time. He even swallowed several pieces of it, and noticed that there was no gum in his stools, which meant that it had successfully decomposed in his gut, like it was supposed to.

 After a decade of selling his product, Fawzi becomes famous and is worth billions of dollars. He is fulfilled, and, finally, because he is doing something he loves and that benefits others, he feels happy. “Nothing is impossible, as long as you are willing to put the work in and believe in yourself,” he thinks.

 Fawzi ends up living a very long life, filled with love, and once he eventually passes, his children follow the instructions he left them in his will, to the letter.

 To this day, if one were to visit the graveyard where Fawzi is buried, on the gravestone would be the following quote, taken from a well-known poem by Robert Frost: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that had made all the difference.”