▸ Column · Modern Midgard — Thor walking among mortals
THOR replies.
The letter
Oliver and I have been together for over a year now — fourteen months — and I honestly couldn't pick a single one of his friends out of a lineup. He has this Thursday trivia thing at a bar with the same group every week. Posts pictures with them all the time. But whenever I mention coming along, he says it's sort of a guys thing, or that I'd be bored. Last month his friend Chase got married — whole weekend out to Nashville — and from what I can tell, Oliver never once told the groom I existed. (We've been over this more than once.) When I brought it up, he said he's just "private," that introducing people too early jinxes things. Too early. We're past a year. I keep thinking about that phrase — like maybe I'm not really his girlfriend so much as something he keeps in a separate compartment, one he hasn't quite figured out what to do with yet. I don't know. Am I being unreasonable?
— Hidden in New York
Thor replies
Good soul, I will not tell you that you are being unreasonable, because you are not.
There is something I earned through exile and a great deal of humbling: love is not something you guard in private, like treasure locked in a vault. I believed that once — I was, in those days, a prince of Asgard who thought possessing great things was the same as honoring them. My father stripped that certainty from me, and I am the better for it.
Oliver calls himself "private." That word is worth examining. Privacy shields what is fragile and new. Fourteen months is neither. The man I was before my banishment would have recognized this move, because I made it — I kept what I valued at arm's length from anything that might complicate my image of myself. I called it discretion. My mother knew it for what it was.
Tell him once, plainly, what the silence costs you. Not in anger — as an honest door left open. A man capable of rising to worthiness will walk through it. That is the test, friend: not whether he says the right words when cornered, but whether he chooses to claim you before the world without being asked twice.
And if he does not — that, too, is an answer. A cleaner one than you may want, but one you will certainly need.
Do not ask three times. You have already asked enough.
— Thor
Hela weighs in
A drawer. He keeps you in a drawer.
I know that drawer. My father had one — he called it "privacy," he called it "the right time," until the right time was his death and the drawer was still sealed. My brother counsels patience and an open door, as he always does, from the throne he was handed with a clean conscience while I waited in the dark for an eternity to see if anyone would come.
Oliver has had fourteen months to claim you. He has answered you. Stop asking for what he has already refused, supplicant — and make yourself undeniable somewhere you are not the thing being kept hidden.
— Hela
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