▸ Column · Modern day — Red Skull preserved and reconstructed into the present, dispensing clinical verdicts from a contempt-column no one asked him to run
RED SKULL replies.
Replied to by Red Skull, with a rebuttal from Captain America.
The letter
Coming up on a full year with my partner, and I have still not met a single person from his life outside of ours — not his Thursday crew, not the coworker whose name I know by now from how often it comes up, not the younger brother who lives in the same city. Every time I raise it, he says the timing is off — the trivia nights are "kind of sacred," the introductions are coming "once things settle down at work." Things never settle. Last week, through a photo someone else tagged him in online, I found out he had thrown a backyard barbecue for a dozen people on the same afternoon he had told me he was spending with his mother. I'm not asking to be the center of his life. But shouldn't I at least be visible in it, after a year? Am I being kept secret, or am I just being foolishly patient?
Red Skull replies
A year. A standing Thursday night you have never once been invited near. A colleague mentioned so often you know her name. A brother in the same city. And then a backyard barbecue — twelve guests, discovered in a photograph you were never meant to see — while you believed him elsewhere.
And your question, after absorbing all of this, is whether you are being impatient.
This is the diagnosis, not the data. What you have described is not ambiguity. You occupy a position this man has decided does not require introduction to his actual life. The deflections — "sacred" trivia nights, work that never calms — are not quite lies; they are the correct information delivered in considerate language. He has placed you somewhere. The evasions tell you where.
What interests me is that you turn the question onto yourself. Schwach. The weakness here is not his evasion — it is your fluency in explaining it away. The captain would tell you to believe the best, to communicate, to have patience with love. He has spent decades being thawed out to absorb comfortable untruths. You may follow his example if you prefer.
Or you may read what you have already been handed. One year is enough to understand what you are being told. You are already positioned. The only outstanding question is whether you will acknowledge the position, or spend another year pretending the assignment might change.
— Red Skull
Captain America weighs in
Don't let Schmidt make this about you, friend. A man told you he was spending the afternoon with his mother, and twelve people turned up at his house. That is not a scheduling conflict. That is a lie.
You are not being impatient. You are being managed. A year is long enough to deserve a straight answer, and you are entitled to ask for one — not here, but to Jerry, directly, tonight if you can arrange it. Maybe there is an explanation. Maybe you will not like the explanation. But what you know right now is that he hid you and then covered it. That is your gut working correctly. It read the situation before you finished writing the letter.
— Captain America
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