sleep. in the worst way and for many hours.

or anything from my wishlist

four margaritas, two tequila shots, one kamakazi, one vodka on the rocks, one peppermint schnaps shot, two hours of vomit

I am standing over your kitchen sink with a pint of stupidly expensive cookie dough ice cream. I am doing what I always do with a pint of cookie dough ice cream over the sink. I am using a teaspoon to meticulously pick out all of the chocolate chips and vanilla ice cream so that all that is left for me to eat are the frozen, ice cream-coated chunks of cookie dough. I'm staring out of the window at the neighbor's cat and, occasionally, arching my back until my eyes are parallel with the blank white of the ceiling. You enter, walk up behind me and put your arms around me, nuzzle in next to my neck in that most familiar couples' position and ask:

"Why do you do that? Why don’t you just admit that all you want is the dough and go and buy a tube of cookie dough and just eat that? Why create all that extra work?"

Even in the moment, I can understand that it is a logical question. That my answer to your logical question will be, as always, illogical. I can see that it was reasonable of you to ask and that the alternative is that you would not care so much about what I did and why I did it -- that you are only curious and not, as I am more used to and more comfortable with, judgmental.

But despite knowing all of that, seeing it form in neatly type-written words in front of my eyes, my anger at you comes shooting down from my brain in million little chemical bullets and rushes out until it fills up my fingertips with heat. I mean, for fuck's sake. Do you know how very few minutes of my day, of every day, are about me? Do you know how many minutes of my day are about somebody needing, wanting, requiring something of me? Walk me through my job, help me with my homework, talk me through my issues, make me feel special, answer my questions, take care of me, be available when I need you, coach me, teach me, make money for me, listen to me, talk to me, read cards for me, give advice to me, rub my back and hands. And you ... you are by far and away the worst offender of the bunch with your constant need for assurance, though I guess I have nobody to blame for that but myself. And this in the year that I had so boldly pronounced would be the year of "Jocelyn for Jocelyn." I love every nanosecond of my life and would never be ungrateful for or complain about all of my strange and unexpected blessings, but sometimes I am just tired and if I want to stand by the sink and pick the ice cream and chocolate chips out of the container and then eat only the cookie dough, there is a reason for it. And the reason is that there is such delight in doing something that results in nothing more than the conclusion that I wanted when I started. The conclusion that I chose and controled, even if the conclusion is simply that I get to eat these oddly hardened balls of raw cookie dough. And there is no process in buying a roll of raw cookie dough and freezing it. In doing that there would be no ten minutes of staring out of the window and watching the cat chase the weeds and thinking about Brangelina or what I need to buy at the grocery story or Kantian philosophy or the complexity of neo-feminism and why I can’t take those women seriously. And if I want those ten minutes of being alone with myself, I should not have to fight you for them, even if I am standing in the middle of your home when I take them. You should know, even though I have never formed the words and spit them out at you, that I require time to refill all of the spongy substance that you and she and he and they suck out of me with plastic soda straws every day. You should just know it, and if you can't know it without my having to spell it out for you, do you, will you, could you, ever really know me?

Could anybody? Am I pathetic for still asking this question at thirty-one years old? Am I self-indulgent? Do I care if I am self-indulgent? It is, after all, the year of Jocelyn for Jocelyn.

Can I not do this no matter how I try? Can any woman? Can any person? Is this level of compromise possibly something that has been lost to us in the course of evolution? As dependency on the opposite sex became less required, did we all lose our capacity to make the kinds of sacrifices emotionally and mentally that we once made as tools of survival? If I can survive physically without you, will my mind and spirit rebel against weakening themselves in order to be with you, or anybody, now that it is not a primal requirement for eating and sleeping and protection?

And I can feel tears forming in my stomach, because I want so to make you happy, and I feel so certain I will fail at that. But will it matter anyway, because you cannot understand my need to pick the ice cream and chocolate chips out of my pint of Hagan Daz and just eat the cookie dough?

And at that moment, I look at the kitchen counter and see the oranges and remember yesterday, when you came back from the grocery storr. You had bought me oranges and Hershey bars and raspberries and pickled okra for no reason other than that you know they are my favorite snack foods and you wanted for me to have food that I liked when I came to your house. You just wanted me to have something to eat that I would like.

And I know that, while that brand of simplicity is not in any way enough for me, I am working so hard to be the kind of person for whom that simplicity is enough. I know that though the end result of me may or may not be designed for you, it is the way you so gently hold me accountable for being the person whom you know I want to be that is getting me closer than I've ever been to that place of not always needing.

And so I lean my weight back into your body and explain to you about why I pick the ice cream and chocolate chips out of the carton. You smile and walk away and leave me alone to do it. The cat finally catches the tricky weed. I decide that Brangelilna have most likely been married in a secret tribal ceremony somewhere, that I need Annie's mac and cheese from the grocery store, that my problem with Kant is that I have never and could never believe that there are not imprints on our brain from the very beginning and I reject the clean slate theory of the mind, and that, in general, I simply detest women who have nothing better to do than discuss endlessly the difficulty of being womyn in any of its forms. And I feel ... possible.