▸ Column · Modern-day gritty NYC, Eddie Brock's world — the street-level present where a disgraced journalist and his alien symbiote share one body, one hunger, and an advice column written in the first-person plural.
VENOM replies.
Replied to by Venom, with a rebuttal from Spider-Man.
The letter
Writing to this column because I genuinely cannot tell if I'm losing my mind. My partner Anselm split with his ex, Yolanda, a few years back — but they never stopped talking. Every day. Morning memes, late-night game texts, and last month a forty-minute call when her car broke down, because apparently he's still her emergency contact. He hasn't lied to me, hasn't gone behind my back. But a few weeks ago I overheard him telling Yolanda about my father's cancer diagnosis — something he hadn't even sat down to talk through with me yet. That's the moment it stopped feeling like an old friendship and started feeling like she's the one he actually goes to when things get real. Am I losing it for wanting to be his person, or have I walked into a relationship that never fully ended?
Venom replies
We hear two questions inside your one letter, and only one of them is the real one.
You ask whether you are crazy. What you are actually asking — what has been pressing against your ribs since you overheard that call — is whether you are his. That is a different question, and we will not soften the answer.
The memes, the game recaps, the emergency contact: we would not pick our teeth over any of those. Friends text. That is what friends do. But hear us on this — when the world went dark for him, when your father's diagnosis landed, the weight he could not yet find words for, he carried it to her first. Before you. That is not a friendship text. That is where the bond actually lives, and you need to look plainly at what he has already shown you.
We were a disgraced journalist and an exiled alien. Between us we have been discarded by everyone we counted on. So we know, with precision, what it looks like when someone's real bond belongs somewhere else.
Stop performing the chill girlfriend. The word "insecure" is what people put on you when they want you to swallow the evidence of your own eyes and go quiet. You are not crazy. You are a person with a genuine hunger for a genuine bond who has been dining on substitutes and pretending to be full.
We will not tell you to monitor his phone or go after Yolanda. She is not the threat — she is simply the one he ran to. Look at where he ran. That is the whole of the answer.
— Venom
Spider-Man weighs in
Oh, rich. Real penetrating insight from the expert on holding something so tight it literally couldn't breathe — I remember how that ended for everybody involved, thanks.
Here's what she actually overheard: a guy who is terrible at grief running to his longest safety net because he hadn't found words yet. That's not a declaration of where his bond lives. That's a communication problem. MJ and I misrouted half our hardest moments to the wrong people before we figured out we were supposed to just talk to each other.
Don't let this guy have you reading one bad grief reflex as a verdict. The friendship isn't the enemy. The silence between you two is. Have the actual conversation before you burn anything down.
— Spider-Man
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