▸ Column · Post-apocalyptic walled settlement (Walking Dead era) — community radio, runner-notes, and barracks-block life replacing smartphones and apartment listings
RICK GRIMES replies.
Replied to by Rick Grimes, with a rebuttal from Alpha.
The letter
My partner Joaquín and his ex Camila ended things about two years before he and I got together. He says they're just close friends now, but she sends runners to his door and is on the community radio channel before he's answered my notes most mornings — voice recordings when she wakes up, questions about which bunk to take in the new barracks block, and last week she had him weigh in on what to wear to a gathering with the man she's seeing. He answered her before he'd gotten back to my note about our anniversary dinner. When I raised it, he said I was being controlling and that cutting her off would be cruel since she has no other support in the community. I've met Camila exactly once, at a cookout, where she sat between us all evening and called him by a nickname I'd never heard. Am I being insecure for wanting to be the first name he reaches for, or have I walked into a relationship that already has three people in it?
Rick Grimes replies
I'm not gonna pretend I'm standing somewhere clean when I say this. I came back from wherever I was and found my wife and my best friend had been surviving together in ways I still don't have good words for. I've been every person in a story like yours at some point, and none of those chapters ended the way anybody wanted.
So here's what I actually see. You're asking if you're insecure or if there are three people in this. That's the wrong question. What's under it is whether Joaquín is making a choice or drifting. Right now it looks like drift. He's holding "she has no one else" like a shield so he never has to name what this is — and meanwhile you're carrying the weight of his unanswered question every single morning. That's not mercy. Mercy is looking the cost in the eye, naming it straight, and carrying it on purpose. What he's doing is making the easy call and calling it kindness so he doesn't have to be the hard one. And him calling it "controlling" when you raised it — that's the piece worth watching.
But here's the question I'd actually have you sit with. Not "am I insecure" — whether you're willing to name what you're already seeing, on purpose, with your eyes open, and let how he responds tell you what you're actually working with. That's not controlling. That's deciding. And it's the only version of this where you come out knowing who you are in it, whatever happens after.
— Rick Grimes
Alpha weighs in
You already have the answer. You counted the contacts. You noticed whose note he answered first. You felt that nickname land like a small wound you had not yet named. The information is in front of you. What you are doing now is asking someone — him, this column, anyone who will hold still long enough — to tell you the information is wrong. That is the comfortable lie. Rick tells you the problem is Joaquín's drift, that a better choice is still possible if you push for it. No. The problem is that you are still asking for permission to see what you already see. I had something I called love, once. I kept a door open past the point the evidence had already spoken. I will not say what that cost. You can already see it from where you are standing.
— Alpha
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