I declare

I sometimes space out on Valentine’s day and imagine what it would be like to receive some obscenely large arrangement of flowers, or possibly a signed copy of my favorite book (because my boyfriend really gets me in my fantasy). And around Christmas, I wish I had someone to read with in front of a fire. I imagine we take turns reading a Christmas Carol, or maybe just How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and this Mr. Wonderful probably has a funny Grinch voice, or he mimics carving the who beast when he reads it. In the spring, I long for someone to walk with, drink wine with, share inside jokes with-someone who would stop in a park and tie my shoe for me (or point out the glass and walk me around it a la Lloyd Dobbler).

Although alone, I am not lonely. I take comfort in the fact that I don’t really need a boyfriend. I’m happy that when I get one, we will be free from the silly roles that people have to play. I enjoy action films. I pump my own gas and kill my own spiders.

I am energized by the prospect of taking care of myself, or I was until today.

This afternoon, if I had a boyfriend, I would have called him in my crying, high-pitched girl voice. I would have asked him to come right over. When he asked what was wrong, I would have squealed about it being too horrible and to come right away. He, responding in some innate, genetic action spurred by the instinctual memory of 1,000,000 hysterical women before me, would have rushed over in a panic to see what was wrong. He would have found me perched at the top of my staircase, trembling and pointing. “Down there,” I would have whispered.

He would have charged down the stairs, finding my beagle, Megra, gleefully eviscerating a dead squirrel. He would have handled the whole mess, possibly without his shirt on. I would have fluttered my eyelashes and sighed, “My hero.”

But that isn’t what happened at all. Instead, I had to deal with the dead squirrel and a beagle that did not want to let it go. I won’t describe the squirrel except to say there wasn’t much left by the time I got to him. I did manage to bag the squirrel and get him up to the trash without touching him, but not without a very serious case of the willies and a few powerful, involuntary shudders.

I often wondered what it would take for me to wish away 150 years of feminism and suffrage. The answer: a dead, half-eaten squirrel.

Look at her, she doesn’t even look guilty.