This, right here, is perfect. Soft JM is playing my favorite songs only loud enough to remind my heart of previous listenings; my chenille purple blanket is draped casually across my legs, as if the natural entropy of my living room splayed it haphazardly enough so as to land in just the right places. The accoutraments of a wonderful evening are laying next to me on the couch - the good book I just put down (A Long Way Gone), a glass of chilled water, and the bowl recently emptied of Cheerios. My heart is warm and I can finally get my trapped thoughts out.

Do you know the effects you have on me? Do you know that when you tell me I'm pretty, I really believe you mean it? And it makes the knots in my stomach go slack.

Do you know that I mean everything I say to you, especially when I tell you I'm scared? That all the quickly-constructed sentences I throw into the space between us (the space that seems to ebb and flow with our jokes and smiles, to rush towards us when we laugh and rush away again to give our long glances more room) mean more than I understand? That my thoughts are always directed at some generalized, lost face in the sky, but that sometimes I wonder if you're that visage I've never known? That when you tell me about some equally generalized individual, I wonder if you mean me?

I'm so scared to feel again someone having so much power over my mind, for someone to have a welcome grip on my heart's swells and bursts. Yet through my fear I'm a hypocrit because I want you, I want us, I want the fear to be real because that would mean the happiness is too. I want to continue fulfilling my ambition, being respected, and succeeding, but I worry that my desires are shifting from intellectual prowess to the categories society deems suitable for me: marriage, motherhood, caretaking. We say the things we think we want to hear, the things we think society wants us to say, the things we think you want us to. But I don't know the difference anymore between what I genuinely want and what I'm afraid to want because society already says I should. I'm afraid of an increasing draw to stereotypical "woman" things, things that repulsed me before for the simple reason that they were stereotypical and "normal". Why is it that we're bred to define our uniqueness, our individuality, in contrast to the norm? I want it to be ok, in my own mind, to emote. Ok to realize I can feel - sorrow, elation, excited terror - without betraying my fundamental beliefs of who I am.

Maybe we really are all the same and want the same things, it's just a matter of who's willing to admit it to themselves and revel in their desires, however typical and passe. Maybe I need to embrace the newly important aspects of my heart's urges and accept that I am a walking paradox -- I want to be self-supported, alone, individual, completely responsible and in charge of my own future, my happiness, and my life's path; but I also want desperately to be taken care of, to be charted, to be dependent and depended upon, to take care of that someone taking care of me, to fit into my gender role. Is this a generational complaint, or an individual psycosis?