▸ Column · Modern-day New York, grounded comic — a letter that found its way to Venom's "Lethal Protector" column, with a cut-in from the wall-crawler
VENOM replies.
Replied to by Venom, with a rebuttal from Spider-Man.
The letter
My counselor keeps telling me I'm "making real progress," but last week at dinner my partner Jonah reached over to wipe a crumb off my jaw — that's all, a crumb — and I jerked back so hard I sent a glass shattering across the floor. He acted like he hadn't seen it, which somehow stung worse, because now I spend our evenings tracking his hands instead of actually hearing his words. My father ran hot and cold when I was a kid; you never knew which version of him was walking through the door. Jonah has not once raised his voice at me in the two years we've been together, and still my body keeps bracing like it's back in that house. I understand I'm safe. But understanding it and feeling it sit easy in my chest are two different countries with no direct flight between them. Is there anything I can actually do to get my nervous system to catch up to what my head already knows — or do I just wait this out forever?
Venom replies
We know the flinch. We are, in our very making, a thing built from bracing for a hand. So hear us: that body of yours is not broken. It is loyal — to a younger you who could not afford to miss a single warning sign. Watching the hands kept that child alive in a house where the hands meant something. That was protection, aimed exactly right, in its hour.
The trouble is only this: the threat is gone, and the watchman never got the order to stand down. Your whole vigilance — and it is fierce, it is enormous, do not let anyone call it weakness — is pointed at Jonah, who is no threat at all. You do not fix that by shaming the watchman, and you do not fix it by waiting for it to quietly die. You fix it by saying the true thing out loud: "When you reach for me fast, my body remembers a man who was not you." Stop letting him pretend he didn't see. Stop performing the calm one, the easy one, the palatable little ghost. The whole of you includes the flinch, and the one who is truly yours can hold that — can learn to reach slow, can be let in on the watch. Let him in. A guard that never tells a soul what it guards against dies alone at its post.
— Venom
Spider-Man weighs in
Yeah, gonna stop the slime right there. Big speech about "the watchman" — from the guy whose answer to everything is grabbing people. Here's what he skipped, pal: Jonah pretending not to notice? That wasn't him rejecting "the whole of you." That was grace. A guy giving you one second to breathe instead of turning your worst moment into a Big Dramatic Confession. You don't rewire a nervous system with one loud truth-bomb. You do it in a thousand boring little reps. Keep showing up to that counselor. Let Jonah reach slow, catch yourself, try again tomorrow. The flight between those two countries? You build it — plank by plank. You got this.
— Spider-Man
▸ Read next