He said he wanted to get to know me. And so he did. Well, he got to know just the things that I thought were important for him to know.
I learned about him too, of course. And I realized that there's no way he could understand me. He might imagine that he does, but he had a fairy tale life and one tragedy. How could he understand a life comprised of a string of tragedies?
To his credit, he showed an honest respect for my experiences and how those shaped me. And he understood why I have my "rules" of engagement. Or disengagement as the case may be.
At some point in the conversation, he called me "a sweet little porcupine." And I remembered something I wrote a long time ago, when I was very new to SL. Then I realized that I've become the sculpture that Starax Statosky had built. The woman in the armor.
But there's more. In another post around the same time, I wrote, "when we open up and realize that it isn't safe, we quickly put on an armor. And, more often than not, the armor has long poisonous spikes."
I suppose the spikes multiplied through those years. And I've morphed into a porcupine.
Not a good thing, I know. And maybe someday I'll work on peeling off that spiked armor, but not likely anytime soon. Like a porcupine, my defensive spikes have become part of me.
On second thought, maybe he really understood me anyway. After all, he chose the perfect metaphor.
