▸ Column · Present day — the column passed to Logan at a roadside bar, modern grounded comic register
WOLVERINE replies.
The letter
I'm writing because I don't have a question so much as a thing I needed to say to somebody who'd get it. My uncle and I tore into each other at my mother's funeral — eleven years ago, over what to do with her house — and we never spoke again. I'd made my peace with it ending there. Then last month he leaves me a voicemail, out of nowhere, says he was sorting through old pictures and found one of the two of us at a county fair when I was seven, cotton candy all over my face, and that he missed me. I nearly didn't call back. I did. We talked two and a half hours, longer than I've talked to anyone in years. Saturday we're having dinner — first time in the same room since 2014. And I'm stunned by how much lighter I feel. Is that normal?
Wolverine replies
Normal? I dunno about normal. I know what it is, though. You been carryin' a rock eleven years and you just set it down. Course you feel lighter. That's not a mystery. That's your back rememberin' what straight feels like.
Here's the part I gotta tell you straight, 'cause I'm the wrong guy to ask and the only guy who knows. Most of the people I had a fight with, I don't get the voicemail. They're gone. I outlived 'em, and the door stayed shut 'cause there's nobody left on the other side of it to open it. A hundred-some years, and I got a long list of folks I'd give an arm to talk to for two and a half minutes, never mind hours.
You got the call. He picked up the phone an old man scared you'd hang up on him. That's a man showin' you what he does, not sayin' it. Don't measure that against eleven years of grudge. Measure it against the empty chair.
So Saturday — go. Don't rehearse, don't keep score about the house. Just sit down across from him and let it be easy. It's worth it. That's the part nobody believes till it's too late.
— Wolverine
Deadpool weighs in
And there it is — Logan found a letter with zero dead people in it and STILL got everybody buried by paragraph two. Love you, you grim coatrack.
Okay, real thing, then back to jokes: the lightness isn't just the rock, sweetheart. It's that you got to put down a character. Eleven years you played The One Who Was Wronged. Full method. And at dinner Saturday, that guy's gonna want his lines back — somebody mentions the house and you both reach for the old script.
Don't. Let one true sentence out before the bit. "I missed you too." Then talk about cotton candy, weather, whatever. The true thing goes first. The chair's full now. Keep it that way.
— Deadpool
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