▸ Column · Modern grounded — present-day, in Deadpool's fourth-wall-aware advice-column world
DEADPOOL replies.
The letter
No problem to report — I just need to hand this to somebody who'll carry it. Last weekend my husband Terrence and I hit 47 years, the whole backyard full of our four kids and nine grandkids. Our oldest, Renata, took me aside and asked, dead serious, what the secret is — she's hurting in her own marriage and didn't want a fridge-magnet answer. So I told her the real one. Around year eleven, Terrence and I made a quiet little pact, never written down, never renegotiated: we'd each assume the other one meant well, even when it sure didn't look that way. That pact pulled freight we never talked about out loud — a miscarriage, a bankruptcy, the eight months he worked nights and we passed like ghosts. Renata cried and said she wished she'd heard it years ago. And I realized I'd been sitting on this thing for decades. I don't need advice. I just feel full of something I don't have a word for, and I wanted to tell somebody who might pass it on.
Deadpool replies
Okay, narrator, hold my chimichanga, somebody wrote in to an advice column with NO problem, just a heart that's about to burst, and now I'M the one tearing up. In a backyard. Hypothetically. With nine grandkids I will never meet because I am, glances at camera, fictional.
Here's your missing word, since you asked me to pass it along: you're not "full of something." You're overflowing, and the dam was 47 years thick. The thing you can't name is what it feels like the first time you finally SAY the load-bearing thing out loud instead of letting it do its quiet work in the dark.
And get this — your whole secret is the exact opposite of my whole personality. You and Terrence decided in advance the other one meant well. I decide in advance I'm unlovable, so the rejection can't sneak up on me. Spoiler: your move works and mine got me a costume.
So don't hoard it twice. The one good thing here isn't writing to me — it's going back to Renata when the casserole's cold and finishing the sentence. Audience of one. ...Okay, sincerity quota hit, here's a taco, we're done.
— Deadpool
Wolverine weighs in
Wade's halfway there, then he made it about words. It ain't the words, lady. You and Terrence had a saying — fine. The miscarriage, the bankruptcy, the eight months of nights — that's where the secret actually lived. Not the pact. The keepin' it when keepin' it cost you somethin'. I've watched a lot of people recite pretty vows and bolt the second it got hard.
So when you hand it to Renata, hand her the right half. "Assume he means well" only holds if the man means well — and you measure that by what he does when it's heavy, not what he says at the anniversary. Watch his hands. Then decide.
— Wolverine
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