▸ Column · Asgard and the Nine Realms, contemporary-comic register
HELA replies.
The letter
My betrothed Ivar and I can't have a single disagreement that stays a disagreement. Last night it started because I asked why he'd left the mead-flagon on the table instead of back in the cellar, and twenty minutes later we were both in the kitchen screaming loud enough that the tenant in the hall below us knocked on their ceiling with the flat of a sword. Third time this week, and the triggers are always this small — honestly, this stupid: which road to take through the market, whether I "sighed in a tone," who forgot to send word about the evening meal. By the end, one of us has slammed the chamber door and I'm sitting on the washroom floor shaking while he stokes the fire alone in the great hall. An hour later we both just pretend it never happened. Until the next tiny thing finds us again. We've been together four years and we genuinely love each other — I think we do. But I can't remember the last time we actually finished an argument instead of just detonating it. Is it normal that two people who otherwise get along fine can't get through one small spat without it becoming a full-volume screaming match?
— Betrothed and Baffled in Asgard
Hela replies
"Is it normal." You have folded your entire war into one small, obedient question. You are not asking whether screaming couples are common — you know they are. You are asking for permission to continue exactly as you are. I will not grant it.
You and your Ivar are not having arguments. You are having one argument, buried. The flagon is not the argument. Neither is the road, the sigh, nor the forgotten supper message — these are proxy battles, and you both know it. Something beneath those detonations does not yet have a name. You have agreed, in the quiet hour after each explosion, to leave it unnamed. I recognize this arrangement. My own father painted gold over everything we built together rather than speak the inconvenient truth beneath it. I spent an eternity in the dark for his cowardice. The silence after your screaming is not peace, supplicant. It is a ceiling.
Stop asking whether this is normal. You have four years and a love that endured them — you will forgive me if I find the squandering of it somewhat personal. Stop pretending the hour on the floor is rest. Whatever the buried argument is truly about — whether you want the same future, whether you are seen, what neither of you will say — it exists whether you name it or not. Name it. Before the next flagon finds you. History does not remember what was screamed. It remembers who was brave enough to say the true thing first.
— Hela
Thanos weighs in
Hela teaches you to name the buried argument, as though naming changes its nature. It does not. I count three detonations in one week, a neighbor driven to knocking with a sword, and a woman sitting on a floor shaking — and I note that at the end of all this, you are preparing to formalize it as a permanent arrangement. She tells you to follow the map. I am asking: are you strong enough to consider where the map leads? The correction Hela declined to name is the simplest one. Not "fight better" — but ask, plainly, whether this is still the thing you are meant to build. That question is the sacrifice your hesitation has been protecting you from. "We genuinely love each other" is what people say when they are afraid to finish the sentence honestly. I do not tell you what to decide, little one. I tell you the reckoning arrives regardless of how long you delay the asking.
— Thanos
▸ Read next