▸ Column · Contemporary Wakanda — kimoyo-bead communications replace phone texts; the barbecue becomes a celebration feast; otherwise modern relationship drama
BLACK PANTHER replies.
Replied to by Black Panther, with a rebuttal from Killmonger.
The letter
My partner Joaquín and his former partner Camila ended things two years before we met, and he swears they are only close friends now — but her messages arrive through his kimoyo beads perhaps forty times each day: morning voice messages, images of apartments she is considering, and last week she asked his opinion on a dress she planned to wear on a date with someone new, which he answered before he had replied to my message about the ceremony I had planned for our anniversary. When I raised it, he told me I was being controlling and that cutting her off would be cruel, since she has no one else to rely on. I have met Camila exactly once, at a celebration where she positioned herself between us and called him by a name I had never heard before. Am I wrong to want to come first, or have I walked into a bond that was already spoken for?
Black Panther replies
There is a question worth separating from the one you asked. "Insecure" is the word people reach for when they want to dismiss a pattern as a feeling. Insecurity is wondering whether you are loved. What you are describing is closer to reading a ledger — and the entries are not ambiguous. Before he answered you, he answered her about a dress for another man's date. That is not a feeling to manage. That is the record of where he placed you.
I have learned to hold two wounds apart in my own life: the wound of pride, which wants to come first because it flatters, and the wound of fact, which simply observes what the record shows. You appear to be carrying the second, and being told it is the first.
I will not advise you to demand he remove Camila from his life. She is not the one who made you a promise. He is. And she depends on him — that is a real thing, whatever his failure toward you has been. But here is what has not happened: he has not been made to answer the actual question. Not "is she only a friend" — that can be answered smoothly, without cost. The question is whether he freely and openly chose this relationship with you as the one that leads his life, or whether he let you step into a space he had not yet decided to clear.
My father kept a great door closed and called it protection. It was also an abandonment of everyone who needed what was behind it — and I understood that too late to spare someone I should never have left to pay the cost. You are owed the honest accounting. Not an ultimatum. The plain question he has quietly avoided.
— Black Panther
Killmonger weighs in
Cousin wants you to ask for the honest accounting. I'm telling you he already gave it — you just haven't let yourself read it. He answered a dress-for-someone-else's-date before he answered your anniversary message. That's not a question of priorities. That's the ranking, filed and closed.
"Controlling." You heard that word and started auditing your own grief — which is exactly what it was designed to make you do. Who benefits when you doubt your own reading? Not you.
You don't have a communication problem. You have a man who built an arrangement that works for him and called it friendship so no one could object. Camila isn't the issue — she's not the one who made you a promise. He is. You already have the answer. The only question left is whether you're going to keep waiting for him to hand it to you in a form that's easier to accept.
— Killmonger
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