▸ Column · Modern grounded — contemporary city life in Invincible's world, the everyday-relationship register beneath the cape stuff.
INVINCIBLE replies.
Replied to by Invincible, with a rebuttal from Thragg.
The letter
My boyfriend Eric and his ex, Marisol, were together six years and split a full two years before he and I got together. I really did think I'd made my peace with them staying friends. Then I picked up his phone to find a recipe and there it was — more than forty texts traded in one afternoon. Memes, jokes only the two of them get, a "you always know how to pull me out of a bad mood," and a goodnight with three little stars. When I asked, he said I was "digging through his life" and that texting her is just how he comes down off a brutal shift at the hospital. But he never comes down like that with me. I get the wrung-out, monosyllabic version. She gets the fun one. Am I just being insecure for wanting to be the one who gets the goodnight stars — or is this as one-sided as it feels?
Invincible replies
First — you're not insecure. He handed you that word so you'd carry it instead of him, and I want you to put it down. What you noticed is real and you're allowed to have noticed it.
Here's the easy answer, and I get why it's tempting: keep reading the phone, build the case, then detonate. Make him cut her off. I've done the act-first thing — I lied to Amber for months to protect my "real life" and told myself it was noble, and all it did was teach her she couldn't trust me even when I was being honest. Snooping and ultimatums don't get you the playful version of him. They get you a guy managing you.
The thing that actually matters isn't the forty-three texts. It's that you said "this hurts" and he answered "you're the problem for seeing it." That deflection is the whole tell. So the harder option — and it is harder, and he might not rise to it — is naming it plainly: I don't need you to delete anyone, I need to be the person you decompress to, and right now I'm not. Then you watch what he does. People who want to choose you, choose you. Out loud. That's the part you can't argue someone into.
— Invincible
Thragg weighs in
The boy is half-right and stops where it flatters him. Strip the sentiment. You possess a finite supply — his ease, his playfulness — and he allocates the replenished portion to Marisol and the depleted remainder to you. That is the structure. "Decompressing" is not a reason; it is an excuse wearing the costume of one, and his accusation that you were "digging" is the move of a being defending an allocation he knows will not survive inspection. Grayson counsels you to talk until he chooses you. The data already chose. Discard "am I insecure" — it is friction. Ask only whether this arrangement serves you, and if it does not, cease maintaining it. — On what those three stars are worth to you, I have no instrument. That, ask someone else.
— Thragg
▸ Read next