Elephants

This morning over brunch with HP2 and Scott, I divulged a confidence from HP2 that I didn't realize that was a confidence. HP2 was not terribly upset that I divulged the confidence, but merely that it was done in front of her. She said that it just seemed like something that was going to be divulged during that secret couple talk that no one talks about. (Ooops, probably shouldn't be releasing that either.)

I've been thinking about secret couple talk ever since. I've picked it up and held it up to the light and examined it from many angles.

Here's the main angle... I do not understand societal conventions, and I have just now really REALIZED this. It's not that I do not understand that they exist. I get that they're out there and that are things that one just does not talk about. What I have a hard time understanding is why it is that we cannot talk about these things? How do we get to this point that we have to keep things in the dark and keep them out of the light? Sometimes they are bad things, sometimes they're just things that we see as bad. But we never talk about them, we never confront them. Not really.

They come up sometimes, but we're always hiding. Avoiding the truth. Delaying the truth. I'm so tired of it.

More secrets. We had to read The Minister's Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne for English Lit. I think I just got it. He decided to wear a black veil every day and the town immediately thought it was because he had done something terribly wrong and shunned him. But, no one ever asked him why he wore the veil -- they asked what he had done, what he was hiding. The truth was that if you didn't have something to hide yourself, you wouldn't think that other people were hiding things.

So, I don't mean to spill your secrets. But, I try to spill mine too. I try to keep things open and in the air. I really want people to believe that what you see IS what you get. But, I'm not sure if that really is true or not.