Shirley is a fun­ny woman. Really. Someone had recent­ly not­ed that she uses the phrase, “Well this is it!”, a lot. It’s usu­al­ly for sit­u­a­tions of agree­able­ness, and spo­ken with iambic dime­tre, empha­sized on every oth­er syl­la­ble.

Shirley’s in denial about the whole mat­ter.

There are always news reports and sto­ries of mass mur­der­ers, pedophiles, rapists, sociopaths whom no one ever sus­pects. In my head I always think that it does­n’t mat­ter how some­one may be per­ceived on the out­side, that any­one could be the next noto­ri­ous psy­chopath. Shirley, how­ev­er, is one of the few peo­ple I would have a very dif­fi­cult time believ­ing as being able to hurt any­one. Some may think that it’s sad to be so cyn­i­cal, so untrust­ing of almost any­one, but that’s just the way my world­view has devel­oped.

Put sim­ply, she’s an inno­cent per­son. Not inno­cent in the igno­rant sense, which is some­thing that I had only recent­ly begun to dis­tin­guish, but inno­cent in the good, whole­some, true, hon­ourable sense. I real­ize that this makes me trust her about as much as I trust my oth­er friends. I hon­est­ly feel like I can divulge almost any­thing to her with­out wor­ry­ing about being judged or mis­in­ter­pret­ed.

Yet there are things that I don’t let her know, because I firm­ly believe that our work­ing rela­tion­ship isn’t worth the risk, if there just hap­pened to be some­thing she found out that she could­n’t deal with.

So does­n’t this mean that I don’t tru­ly trust her?