the elephant won't forget what it's like inside his cage....

C. asked me last night if I wanted to know why she had suddenly turned snippy with me.

We'd been chatting as we cooked dinner. C. had been away the night before, and we were catching up. She was telling me about the "Leaders of the Free World" conference (or whatever) that she had been attending in London, and I was just gabbing away about this and that. As I was telling her how my meeting with my boss had gone, she suddenly became impatient with me. In response, I began to clam up as I became self-conscious about what I was telling her, and wondering why she didn't seem to be interested or if I'd told her all this before and she was bored with it.

A couple of minutes later, she asked me if I wanted to know why her mood had shifted.

Instantly and without really thinking about it, I replied that I didn't think that I did.

"You don't want to know?" She was surprised. She clearly wanted to tell me.
"I don't think I do"
"Really? Don't you think it's healthy that we share this kind of stuff with each other?" She definitely wanted to tell me.
"I don't think I want to know"

She looked at me for a few seconds and then dropped it. We haven't talked about it since.

It's not that I didn't care about how she was feeling, or that there was any reason why I wouldn't want to know, it's just that my immediate gut reaction was that I simply didn't want to know. I have no clear idea why, but I just had this powerful feeling that I didn't want to talk about it, and ultimately I was powerless to resist it.

I'm sure it wasn't that big a deal, but for some reason I just couldn't deal with it.

That's bad, right?

I try to be open, and I'm actually proud of the fact that I usually say what I think and that I tend to wear my emotions on my face for everyone to see... but I can also be very secretive and closed off, even from those people that I love the most.

Curse my metal body.