▸ Column · Present day — Diana of Themyscira, envoy among mortals, answering the post
WONDER WOMAN replies.
Replied to by Wonder Woman, with a rebuttal from Cheetah.
The letter
For fourteen months an ocean has sat between me and the man I love — he took a hospital post in Glasgow, I stayed in Toronto to finish my doctorate. I thought we were unshakable until last weekend, when I noticed three whole days had passed without my missing him, and all I felt was relief. Our Sunday calls still happen. They're pleasant. But "pleasant" is what I'd say about a dentist I like, not the person I'm meant to be building a life with. My sister insists I'm only burned out — book a flight, she says. I did, in March. Nine days with him, and I came home carrying the same low, grey emptiness I'd packed going out. The separation was meant to last two years with a fixed end. That end has quietly slipped twice. Every time I raise the timeline he turns the subject to how brutal the residency is — true, real, and yet it leaves me nothing to plan around. I can't tell if I'm grieving the relationship or only the version of it I was promised, and I'm afraid of doing something I can't undo before I know which.
Wonder Woman replies
Friend, your body has already told you the truth and you have spent a season hunting for someone — your sister, the next flight — to overrule it. Three days of peace is not burnout. It is a verdict you keep appealing.
So hear the hard thing first. The emptiness is not the injustice. The shifting horizon is. A date that moves twice and dissolves into "the residency is hard" every time you reach for it is not an answer — it is a man handing you fog and asking you to call it weather. You cannot build a future on something no one will let you measure.
I loved a man I could not keep — Steve — and I know the particular grief of mourning the life you'd already furnished in your mind. That grief is real. But you do not get to skip the asking. Go to him, plainly: I need a real date, not a feeling about one. Can you give me that? His answer — or his refusal to give one — is the thing you've been too frightened to let yourself receive.
You are not weak for going cold. You went honest. Now be brave enough to say it out loud to the one person who hasn't heard it yet. The truth does not ask your permission. Stand in it anyway.
— Wonder Woman
Cheetah weighs in
Diana, always sending the prey back to ask the hunter for a date. How tender.
Little one, he already answered you — twice — when the horizon slid and he let it. The numbness you mistrust is the only honest animal left in this story; it stopped waiting before your mouth caught up. You don't need a plain conversation. You need to notice you've been kept fed on Sunday calls precisely so you'll stay docile in Toronto while his real life grows up around him in Glasgow.
Don't announce your leaving. Don't grovel for a calendar. Just be gone, and let him discover your worth the way his kind always does — by the empty chair. Grieve the "version you expected," darling. It was never coming.
— Cheetah
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