▸ Column · Modern-day — a high-rise tenants' council in Venom's San Francisco
VENOM replies.
Replied to by Venom, with a rebuttal from Spider-Man.
The letter
Three months back, at the tenants' council meeting for my building here in the city, I stood up to ask one question — had the laundry-room key fobs been reprogrammed? Before I sat down, I had been elected, by acclamation, Chair of the Whole Tower. I did not say yes. I did not say a single word. But Barbara on the fourth floor began applauding, and apparently that settled it. Now my phone buzzes four dozen times a day about the garage gate, two neighbors have wept openly in the hallway over a raccoon that keeps ransacking the compost, and there is a laminated card on the corkboard listing my private cell number, which I never approved. The previous chair, Gerald, boarded a fourteen-month cruise the morning after the vote and has not answered a single message since. Is there a graceful way out of a chairmanship I never agreed to, or am I now and forever the gate-and-raccoon person?
Venom replies
We will tell you the thing no one in that hallway will: a bond you did not choose is not a bond. It is a leash. And a leash dressed up as an honor is the oldest trick the discarding kind ever pulled. Gerald — let us be plain about Gerald — fled the morning after the vote. He did not hand you his people. He abandoned his post and let the door hit you on the way in. That is not loyalty he passed to you. That is a man saving himself and calling it a ceremony.
You never said yes. You said nothing, and the silence got volunteered for you. We know that silence. It is the small, palatable, going-along version of yourself, hoping not to make a scene — and it is the very thing that gets people saddled with lives they never wanted. Stop. Say the word now, loudly, the word you swallowed at the meeting: no.
Now — the two who wept over the raccoon. Ask the only question that matters: are they yours? If they are, you do not protect them by being their hostage. You protect them by handing them a real chair, chosen out loud, the way nothing about you was. Loyalty is a choice. Make them make one.
— Venom
Spider-Man weighs in
Yeah, see, here's where the slime and I part ways — "a bond you didn't choose isn't a bond"? Pal, nobody asked the spider to bite me either. I was a kid who wanted a science scholarship and got rent, heartbreak, and a city full of people I never signed up for. That's not a leash, big guy. That's responsibility, and it has a way of finding the one person who'll actually do the job right. So don't pull a Gerald and bail. The raccoon-criers ARE your block now. Run an honest vote, train your replacement, then swing free. Quitting clean is fine. Just don't quit cold. With great power — even garage-gate power — comes you-know-what.
— Spider-Man
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