▸ Column · Modern X-Men era (early 21st century); Logan reads this somewhere between missions — not when he wanted to be found.
WOLVERINE replies.
Replied to by Wolverine, with a rebuttal from Sabretooth.
The letter
My partner hasn't given me one solid thing to point at, and that's exactly what's making me crazy. He still comes home, still texts back, still makes plans with me. But the last two months or so there's been a low hum underneath everything — like I'm sharing space with someone who has his face but is operating on a different frequency. I've almost picked up his phone twice, just to disprove what I'm feeling, but there's nothing to disprove: no pattern changes, no warning signs from the checklist. When I eased into asking if he was okay, he looked at me like I'd asked him the color of air, and I had nothing to follow it up with. Just this knot below the sternum that won't translate. Is my gut actually running ahead of something real, or am I writing a crisis into a situation that doesn't have one?
Wolverine replies
The gut does know. Before the brain's got a name for anything, the body's already read it. I learned not to argue with that signal a long time ago.
But what it picks up and what it means — those are two different things. Could be he's carrying weight he doesn't have language for yet. People go quiet inside before they even know they're doing it. That ain't necessarily the thing you're afraid it is.
Don't scroll the phone. You find nothing, the knot stays. You find something — now you had to sneak to get it, and you're carrying that on top of everything else. Neither ending is clean.
I knew a woman named Jean. Had a sentence for her — a real one — every single day for years. Never said it. Timing was wrong, or it wasn't my place, or I told myself there'd be more time. She's gone. So when I tell you to say the hard thing — I don't mean 'are you okay,' he can duck that — I mean something like: I don't know what I'm feeling but I'm feeling it and you need to know I am. I'm saying that from the wrong side of having sat on it too long. I'm bad at this. Do it anyway.
— Wolverine
Sabretooth weighs in
You already know. That knot isn't anxiety — it's the oldest sense you've got, the one that was reading the room before you had words for rooms.
The runt'll tell you to say the impossible sentence. Very touching. He's been choking his own instincts so long he thinks hesitation is wisdom. What it actually is: sitting on your hands while someone operates in your den.
The phone's right there. Look.
Stop calling yourself paranoid — that's the leash, the thing that makes prey pause long enough to get eaten. If there's nothing there, nothing changes. If there is — you found out before you wasted another year being soft about it.
You smell something off in your own territory, you don't hold a feelings meeting. You check. Stop being prey in your own den.
— Sabretooth
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