Well, I'll tell you

Last night I had a remarkably bad night's sleep, and I'll just share one of the markers of how bad it was. At about three in the morning, I half-woke-up from a doze utterly confused. The room was backwards. The window was where the door should have been and vice versa; there was an inexplicable drop between my side of the bed and the F-word's, and when I stretched the headboard had disappeared. I lay there wondering just how status quo this all was and didn't realize what had happened until I got up for a drink of water: I had occupied my boyfriend's side of the bed, and had been lying feet-to-the-headboard. I'm sure both that that hadn't been the case before falling into a doze, and that I have never. Ever. Done anything like that before.

It would be a lie to say I'm under more stress than ever before. Obviously that was the wrap-up of my thesis, or its actual defense, or the French oral exams, or something else to do with France. But one thing I can say is that I've never been with a man who I loved as much as I love this one while being under this much stress, and it adds a whole new dimension because I don't want to subject him to it, but we have a degree of intimacy that gives the illusion of giving me no choice. When I was single or indifferent I could come home and be a miserable asshole without thinking it a problem. But now I have to keep it inside, or express it differently, or walk it off, or something. I know I need to find some way to deal, because while I was lying there utterly confused about why the room was backwards and the headboard had disappeared, I obscurely but honestly blamed the F-word for it.

The truth is I like my job more than any other job I've had, but my brain is turning into a first-grader who's tired of math class and wants to go back to the craft table. Why go to all the trouble of educating me and giving me books and an imagination and some sort of aesthetic sense if at the end of it I was going to be the efficient cog in a corporate machine I know does more harm than good? And it throws me to the navel-gazing, middle-class, but thus far irrefuted conclusion - what the hell else did I think it was preparing me for? What else do I think the people who loved me and educated me wanted for me besides this sort of security and upward mobility? And what else do I expect unless I grow a pair and risk hurting them with my choices?

And these are my problems, my decisions, my rhetorical questions to answer; it's unfair to take any frustrations from it out on the F-word, or even on the people who loved me and educated me right into the situation I'm in today, and for whom my unconscious seems to be making the F-word the proxy. They were all doing their best, and the F-word didn't do any of it; in fact, he's the right partner for the woman I want to be.