▸ Column · Modern grounded Gotham — contemporary setting, grounded comic register
HARLEY QUINN replies.
Replied to by Harley Quinn, with a rebuttal from Poison Ivy.
The letter
Ezra and I have been together for fourteen months and I still couldn't identify a single one of his friends if they walked up to me on the street. He has a Thursday trivia night — same five or six guys in every photo he posts — and whenever I ask to join he says it's kind of a "guys' thing," or that I'd be bored. (I'm genuinely not bored, for the record.) His friend Caden got married last month and Ezra flew to Nashville for the whole weekend. Apparently nobody in that group knows I exist, which I only figured out when I asked why I wasn't even mentioned. Ezra says he's just "private" and that introducing people too early jinxes things. We've been together fourteen months. I honestly don't know what we're still too early for. It's starting to feel like I'm not really his girlfriend — more like something he keeps filed away where his actual life can't see it.
— Kept in a Drawer in Gotham
Harley Quinn replies
Fourteen months and Caden's never heard your name. Ezra flew to a wedding for one of his closest friends and didn't think to mention, even in passing, that he has a girlfriend. And his explanation is that he's "private."
Sweetie, I need you to sit with what that word is doing there.
"Private" is what people say when the truth is "compartmentalized," and compartmentalized means he built you a very cozy little drawer and labeled it DO NOT OPEN IN FRONT OF OTHERS. I had a guy like that once. Real private fella. Great at speeches, terrible at the basics — like, oh, I don't know, acknowledging I existed to anyone who knew him before me. Took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that "private" was his way of saying the story of us was only supposed to run in one direction.
Here's what I know about men who call themselves "just private": they ain't private. They're selective. And the question you gotta ask is — selective about what, and why, and for whose benefit?
You know what I'd do? Ask him to name five people in his life who know your name. Just five. Watch what happens when the speech has to become a list.
Red flags ain't decorations, cupcake. Fourteen months is enough receipts to read.
— Harley Quinn
Poison Ivy weighs in
Harley, darling — "watch what happens when the speech becomes a list" is adorable. It's also the exact test you ran on a certain someone for about five years before finally deciding the results were conclusive. Sweet thing, the diagnostic is already done. Fourteen months is the data. You don't need five names; you already know no one in his world can pick you out of a room. Stop watering him and asking why nothing blooms. Some things are dead. You already know how to pull a weed. Start there, before another season passes.
— Poison Ivy
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