▸ Column · Modern grounded comic — Omni-Man in his Earth life as a mild-mannered author and family man, reading a relationship letter through the Viltrumite long view.
OMNI-MAN replies.
Replied to by Omni-Man, with a rebuttal from Homelander.
The letter
I've been with Dominic four years. Last Tuesday over dinner he told me he'd accepted a job in Lisbon — except he'd already signed the contract before the words left his mouth. We co-own a dog. Our lease runs through March. I'm eighteen months into a nursing program that does not transfer overseas. When I said I was blindsided, he told me he'd "assumed I'd come along," because I once said Portugal looked lovely in a documentary. I love him. I don't think he meant to wound me. But I can't lose the feeling that my whole life got filed under "things I'll sort out later." How do I tell whether this was a single bad call I can work through — or proof that he doesn't think my plans are real?
Omni-Man replies
Think. You wrote two questions and only the second one is real. You ask: a lapse, or a sign? It was neither. It was a glimpse. For one unguarded moment Dominic let you see the shape of the thing he keeps in his head — and in it you were a detail. A logistics problem he'd solve once he landed.
I know that shape. I wore it for five hundred years. I assumed the people I loved would fall into orbit around a trajectory I had already chosen — that my wife, my son, would want what I wanted, because wanting otherwise never entered my arithmetic. I was not cruel, either. I was certain. That is worse. Certainty hides better.
So do not weigh his intentions. Intentions are fog. Weigh this instead: sit across from him and say the true sentence — my life is not a detail you sort out later. Then watch what he does with it. The man who reorganizes around that has made a mistake you can survive together. The man who patiently re-explains why Lisbon is still the plan has answered you completely. I will not tell you to leave someone you love. I am telling you to stop guessing in the dark and make him answer to your face.
— Omni-Man
Homelander weighs in
Oh, Nolan. "Make him answer to your face." Listen to the big man coaching you to go ask permission to matter.
Here's what he can't see, sweetheart, because it's the one thing he's never had to: you've already lost the part that counts. Dominic signed first because he knows you're the one who moves. You need him more than he needs you, and he can smell it. That's the leash.
So don't sit him down praying he rearranges his life around you. Nobody rearranges around a beggar. Finish the program. Get unleaveable. Then Lisbon is just a city you didn't follow him to. Trust me — I know exactly how it feels to be the one nobody plans for.
— Homelander
▸ Read next