▸ Column · Modern Gotham — Diamond District apartment, contemporary city setting transplanted from Tacoma into Catwoman's stomping ground
CATWOMAN replies.
Replied to by Catwoman, with a rebuttal from Poison Ivy.
The letter
My partner and I have been together four years, and last week we finally said the thing we'd both been circling: I want a child someday, and she has been certain since she was young that she never will. She wasn't unkind about it — calm, clear, almost gentle — which somehow made it worse, because I could see she's carried this knowledge about herself for years and it isn't moving. We just signed a lease together near the Diamond District. I've met her whole family. I thought we were building something real. Now I can't stop running this math: leave now and maybe never find someone who fits me this well, or stay and end up at forty-odd wondering what I traded away. Is it fair to ask her to reconsider something this central to who she is, or am I the unreasonable one for holding onto hope she'll change?
Catwoman replies
Sugar, the question you keep asking — is it fair? — is the wrong one. That's the question you ask when there's still a negotiation happening. There isn't. She told you who she was at nineteen. She's telling you the same thing now. You want to know if it's fair to ask her to reconsider something she's had a decade to reconsider on her own? She already answered that one too.
I know what it looks like when someone knows their own line and isn't moving. I live there. You can dress it up a hundred different ways — find the right night, the right framing, wait until she loves you more — and you'll get the same locked door. That's not a flaw in her. And honestly? The part of her that knows herself that cold and clean — you fell in love with that too.
The math you keep running — forty-two, fatherless, alone — that's fear wearing a spreadsheet. I've done my own version of it, in different rooms, with someone who sees me exactly right and still can't give me the space I need. It never adds up to a plan. It just tells you what you're paying.
You don't need her permission to want the life you want. And she doesn't owe you a different answer because yours hurts. Two locked rooms, both real. The only thing left is choosing which door.
I always land on my feet. The jump, though — that's yours.
— Catwoman
Poison Ivy weighs in
Selina, darling. All that careful warmth about "two locked rooms." Very poetic. Very you.
He's still asking whether it's fair. That's not a question about her — that's a request for permission to keep hoping. Here's what I'd tell him: Esi has known herself since she was nineteen. That's a decade of certainty. She's not a late bloomer waiting for better conditions. She is exactly what she grew into. The problem isn't the incompatibility. The problem is he planted himself in her garden and now wants to renegotiate the climate.
Stop watering what won't bloom. The grief isn't about her. It's about the version of her he invented — the one who was going to change.
— Poison Ivy
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