One Goodbye Too Many

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

We'll never be entirely detangled, no clean cuts and closure for us. We are messy stitches and open sores and only time will stem the oozing from our damaged souls. There is no making this right. It is broken and so are we.

There is nothing I can say or do and nothing you can hear that will make this heal better. I will always be the villain of your story, the weakling, the one who ran away, the one who wouldn't listen or couldn't understand. I will be smaller than, meaner than, a porcelain doll with a frowny face that shattered in the fall. You will never see me as I am, and the you in my head is impossibly distorted. We will not reach each other again. There is no fixing the fragments we've left behind.

I cannot claw myself out of you. I cannot take back the pieces of my past embedded in your memory, the infected cysts of what we were. They belong to you now, and they will travel places I cannot see and be turned towards ends I cannot imagine and there is nothing I can do about it. You will always have this ammunition. I will never be safe.

There are no goodbyes that will fix it, and we've said goodbye too many times already. We cannot extract the shrapnel from our wounds, and the attempts just keep us bleeding longer.

I hate you. I don't. It's no good. Goodbye.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

wow.  Is this concerning what we had talked about?

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

wow.  Is this concerning what we had talked about?

Oh yeah. I got three emails and a phone call since we talked. Today should be the last of them, though.