Shedding Light | not heat

“I’m a bitch, aren’t I?” I heard someone ask over my shoulder.

I turned around in case she was talking to me. It’s odd to have people near my personal space at all, so the likelihood of her talking to someone else around my personal area seemed really slim. Two people around my workspace at once? Surely not.

Indeed she was talking to me. She was leaning against my partition, supporting herself on her elbows. Arms folded, she stood there looking at me expectantly. I cannot and could not tell you what exactly she was wanting me to say. You can’t say “well of course you are,” nor can you say “I don’t know you well enough to make that sort of assumption.”

I went with “I’m sorry?”

She sighed at me and rolled her eyes. I wanted to tell her that I’d had a rough morning. That I had woken up at 8:15, underneath a pillow which had somehow migrated to my lap during the night. I wanted to tell her that, having woken up just minutes before I am supposed to be out the door, I still somehow managed to make it to work on time with a lunch, a shower, and dressed. My hair was sort of brushed, too, and I had brought myself a breakfast of oatmeal with cut up bananas and strawberries. I wanted to tell her that no matter how important the trouble of her seeming like a bitch felt to her right now, it was coming in below coffee on the scale of things that are really important to me just now.

“I know, you don’t say things like that,” she said, her high voice getting a little whiny. “Do you think I’m a ‘B’?”
“I’m sure that you are no such thing,” I said to her, patting her hand. “Can I help you with something?”
“Do people always need an objective? Can’t I just come over to talk?”

This is a conversation with no avenue of recovery. If you ask what she wants to talk about then it’s like you’re asking her to perform. If you don’t ask, then you’re left in silence. If you don’t ask, but carry on with your own conversation then there is this area of contrived conversation while she tries to manipulate it to aim at what she wanted to talk about in the first place.

“Of course you can talk,” I said to her, talking out my earplugs and picking up my coffee. “What’s on your mind.”
“Oh nothing!” she chirped. “Just sayin’ hi!”
“Saying hi by asking if I think… you’re mean?”
“Well we all need something to break the ice!”

One would think the ice would best be broken with ‘hi’ and then obliterated with the ‘am I a B’ moment, but there it is.

Who am I?