To-Do: Femergency Kit

Sometimes, especially in the earlier days of your relationship, your girlfriend will forget some of the 'necessities' when she spends the night. Personally, I like to be prepared for any eventuality, and, based on the presumption that she will, one day, find herself crashing with you overnight, I like to make sure that she finds herself missing nothing. And if it's really the thought that counts, then this one should get you quite a few points.

At some point in my teenage years, one of my friends had given me a birthday gift that was inside of a pink tackle box. I don't remember what the gift was, but it's the tackle box that's important.

When I moved out on my own I ended up finding the tackle box again, hidden away somewhere underneath my bed in misuse, and I wondered what I was going to do with it. I briefly considered taking it to the salvation army, and then realized it would be easier to just leave it at my parent's house and forget about it. It wasn't until everything else was packed that I realized that I could use it for something else.

Before I moved to my current town, I spent a few weeks crashing in a one-room apartment with four of my friends, all of them female. If you've ever experienced a closed-quarters estrogen festival, then you know how incredibly scary it could be. One of the things that I did walk away from that with was the idea for the femergency kit.

The next time I had a girlfriend coming over, and I suspected that she would be crashing at my place, I prepared by buying a few things to stock the pink tackle box with. There was a brush, hair ties, a small travel hair dryer, a new toothbrush, a compact, a small makeup kit, and, of course, tampons. Over the years some of the items in the box evolved and changed, and I think at some point I put a travel hair straightener in there.

I assumed that everything else that was needed in there would either come to me as I felt the need, like the flashlight that made it's way into the box, or the women in my life would tell me that they were missing, like the nail clippers, nail file, and tweezers that I would go out to buy for the box.

When I mentioned the femergency kit to my buddy once, he told me that I should put a pair of panties in there, but I figured that buying panties for an imaginary woman would be both awkward and creepy. Also, even if my girlfriend has forgotten her purse somewhere along her travels, I would hope that she would have had the presence of mind to at least wear her own underwear.

Most of the girls that spent the night at my house ended up bringing their own things and never found use of the kit, which is fine, because it was meant only for those that couldn't remember their things. But eventually came the day that someone did use it.

And then she got used to it. And one day, as she was leaving for a week of camping with her friends, she asked me if she could borrow it because it was convenient. I agreed, since I had no problem with that, and that's the last I saw of the femergency kit. I assumed that she would return it when she was done, and I do remember seeing it in her bedroom once, but it would never make it back to my own.

One day, as she awoke, she started rooting around my closet for a few minutes while I remained in my half-slumber, not yet ready to get out of bed, and then she asked me "where's the box?" I wasn't really ready for thinking, so I made some inhuman sound that was raised at the end as though it were a question and she repeated: "the pink box. Where is it?" I had to think about that for a few seconds before telling her "I thought you had it?" And she said "yeah."

Apparently she thought that I would have gone out and bought a second tackle box so that she could keep the first. I didn't. She kept the tackle box, and I never got a new one.

I still think it's a good idea, though.