▸ Column · Modern Marvel New York — corporate-tower friendships in the long shadow of OsCorp
GREEN GOBLIN replies.
Replied to by Green Goblin, with a rebuttal from Spider-Man.
The letter
My friend "Dara" and I have been tight since our OsCorp internship days, and I love her, but every call runs the same loop: forty-five minutes on her on-again-off-again thing with a guy named Marcus, I weigh in, she steamrolls it, then she's gone the second I bring up my own life. Last month I finally made senior analyst — two years of grinding — and her reply was "great, ANYWAY, you won't believe what Marcus pulled at brunch." That was the whole celebration. Now I flinch when her name lights up my phone, which makes me feel like garbage, because she sat with me through real darkness, including my dad's illness back in '21. But I tallied the last six months and she's asked me a genuine question about me maybe twice. Do I have the blunt conversation — or does the dread already mean this friendship flatlined and I'm just slow to sign the certificate?
Green Goblin replies
Heh heh HEE HEE! A LEDGER! You kept a LEDGER — six months, two whole questions, tallied like a quarterly earnings report! Oh, I could KISS you, you marvelous little bean-counter. You already know. You're not asking me, you're asking permission to feel what you've felt since spring.
A "direct conversation"? Pfaugh. You'll sit her down, voice trembling, and she'll cry and promise and call you in nine days about Marcus's brunch. That's not a friendship, sweetling — that's an unpaid subscription.
Here's the Osborn truth, free of charge: people are mirrors that only show themselves their own faces. I had a son. Harry. I had a whole tower full of men who'd have died swearing they adored me — and I spent every one of them like loose change buying something shinier. Don't tally HER. Tally YOU. You made senior analyst! You climbed! So CLIMB. Get so high, so dazzling, so untouchable that Dara becomes a name you can't quite place. Let her keep Marcus. Drop the pumpkin and glide, my dear — don't text back. Vanish like money. HEE HEE!
— Green Goblin
Spider-Man weighs in
Norman. Buddy. You "had a son." Past tense. You hear yourself? You're the last guy in five boroughs who should be coaching anybody on who to keep around — you optimized Harry right out of your life and you STILL call it winning.
Here's the thing the green ghoul skipped: she sat with you in '21. That's not a subscription, pal, that's a person who showed up when it was ugly. So make the call. Not a "certificate," not a ledger — just, "hey, I miss being asked about me." Friends are worth one more swing. If she can't manage it after that? Then you grieve it honest. But you don't ghost somebody who held the door in the dark. That's HIS move. Don't borrow it.
— Spider-Man
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