▸ Column · Modern-day, the bonded pair of host and symbiote answering from their cramped life on the margins of the city
VENOM replies.
Replied to by Venom, with a rebuttal from Spider-Man.
The letter
Nine years ago a stranger got bunked into my dorm room and turned into the person who knows all my shorthand. We do ramen every Thursday. Lately my chest does something humiliating every time she sends me a blurry photo of a dog she passed on the street, and last week I caught myself planning an outfit for her sister's wedding solely because she'll be in the room. Here's the knife: she just crawled out of a two-year relationship and keeps telling me I'm "the one person in her life who isn't complicated." If I confess, I become complicated — proof she was wrong to trust me. Stay quiet and I keep her forever as a friend. Speak and miss, and I lose the most important person I have. Do I gamble the best thing I've got on the chance it becomes more?
Venom replies
Hear us, because you have already lied to yourself in the asking. "Keep her forever as a friend." That is not keeping. That is taxidermy. You would mount a smaller, simpler version of yourself — the "uncomplicated one" — on her wall and call it love, and every Thursday you would feed the fake one while the real one starves under the table. We know this hunger you are throttling. We were a ruined man, alone. We were a thing exiled by its own kind. We learned that the part of you that you hide to stay palatable is the exact part that gets discarded — because no one chose YOU, they chose the ghost you performed.
So tell her. Not because we promise she'll fall — we promise nothing. Tell her because the truth is the only version of you worth keeping, and a friendship built on you swallowing yourself was already half a loss.
But mark our hardest lesson: she is freshly wounded, and she is not yours to capture. Speak your truth once, plainly, and then let her breathe. Loyalty that lets her choose is the bond. Loyalty that needs an answer tonight is a cage.
— Venom
Spider-Man weighs in
Yeah, yeah, "taxidermy," very spooky, big guy. But you skipped the part where SHE'S the one bleeding here, not your asker. She just got dumped after two years — she's running on fumes and Thursday ramen. Buddy, I've botched this exact swing with MJ a dozen times; honesty's right, but timing is the whole web. Don't unload your big confession on someone who's still picking glass out of her heart and call it "loudly being yourself." Be the friend first. Let her get steady. THEN, when it won't feel like a trap, tell her the truth — gently, no pressure. The little guy in this story is Esther. Mind her.
— Spider-Man
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