▸ Column · Attack on Titan — inside the walls, Survey Corps era
LEVI ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Levi Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Eren Yeager.
The letter
I'm 31, newly bumped up in rank, and the person I've shared two years with — Anselm — is 52 and already raised two children who are grown and posted to other regiments. At first the years between us were nothing: we drilled together, ate together, finished each other's sentences in the mess hall. Now they're the whole thing. I want a child. I want a loud house behind the walls with somebody's small boots by the door. He's done that life once, and what he dreams of now is selling everything and seeing the ocean past the walls before his knees give out. He says he'd "consider" another child, but I see how tired he is when he says it, and I won't drag an exhausted man to a cradle at the second bell. How do two people who love each other this much go on standing on opposite banks of the same river?
Levi Ackerman replies
Tch. Drop the river. It's a clean sentence and it's hiding the real one, which is plain: you both told the truth about what you want, and the two truths don't point the same way. That's not a tragedy. It's just hard, and you keep dressing hard up as doomed.
You already did the honest part — you said you won't drag a tired man to a cradle. Good. That's clean thinking. Hold onto it. Most people would lie there.
So here's the only question worth your time. Not "will it work out." No one knows that — not him, not you, not me. The question is which regret you can carry. The child you wanted and didn't have, or the years you spent waiting on a man's "consider" until the choice got made for you by time. Sit with both. Pick the one you could stand to wake up next to for forty years.
Then commit to it the whole way. Half a decision — staying while you grieve the kid, leaving while you mourn him — gets two people killed slow. I've watched that. The love being real doesn't make the want go away. Choose, mean it, don't relitigate it at the second bell.
— Levi Ackerman
Eren Yeager weighs in
Levi's right that you told the truth. He's wrong about which word in your letter is load-bearing. It's "consider." You're standing at the edge of your one life waiting for a tired man to grant you a child, and that waiting is the cage — not the years between you, the waiting.
So the first half: don't. The loud house is yours to want. Move toward it. Don't let "he'd consider it" quietly become the gate you never walk through.
The second half, the one I paid everything to learn — don't take it across him. Don't shame an exhausted man into a cradle to fill yours. Build your own door. Don't bar his to do it.
— Eren Yeager
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