▸ Column · Modern Gotham City — Poison Ivy's advice column in an underground Gotham zine, contemporary era
POISON IVY replies.
Replied to by Poison Ivy, with a rebuttal from Batman.
The letter
I've been seeing someone for about thirteen months, and I still haven't been introduced to a single person in his life. He brings up his friends constantly — this guy Bashir he plays squash with, a whole crew that meets Thursday nights somewhere in the Heights — but whenever I hint at coming along, he says those nights are "low-key" and leaves it there. We meet at my apartment or some restaurant clear across the bridge from his neighborhood, never anywhere he might run into someone who knows him. Last week I found out his roommate had no idea he was seriously seeing anyone. That hollowed me out somewhere real. Am I his girlfriend, or something he's keeping in the dark until something better surfaces?
— Invisible in Gotham
Poison Ivy replies
You're growing in a closet, sweet thing, and you're calling it a relationship. He has your warmth. He gives you a restaurant across the bridge and the pleasure of his company in the dark. That's not intimacy — that's what a weed does when it doesn't want to be seen.
I know what grows in shadows. I've studied it. The parasitic vine doesn't reach toward sunlight because it can't survive there; it thrives on what it can quietly take. Thirteen months. Squash. Thursday trivia. His entire human ecosystem, spreading and flowering — and you're the pot stashed on the bottom shelf.
His roommate doesn't know your name. Fruit doesn't lie.
The one human I've kept in my life — Harley, and god knows she's earned the exception — has dragged me through half of Gotham's worst nights and never once pretended I wasn't there. She's pulled me out of Arkham, out of the mud, out of my own worst ideas. She's earned every inch of soil I give her. Everyone else in my life is provisional at best, and even they know I exist.
Stop feeding what refuses to bloom toward you. He's extracting. Pull him by the root. There's no guilt in composting what was already dying.
— Poison Ivy
Batman weighs in
Ivy wants you to pull the weed. Don't.
Not because he's worth keeping. He isn't. Thirteen months. A hidden apartment. A roommate who doesn't know your name. The evidence is already in.
But a detective doesn't walk away before the confession. Go ask him directly what this is. Not to fix it — to close the case. He'll tell you, one way or another.
Ivy calls this pruning. She calls everything pruning. It's why she tends her garden alone and calls it a philosophy.
Don't confuse knowing with running. Get the answer. Then leave.
— Batman
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