▸ Column · Within the walls of Paradis, the Survey Corps era
EREN YEAGER replies.
Replied to by Eren Yeager, with a rebuttal from Mikasa Ackerman.
The letter
Three years ago my husband Tomás came back from a trip to the southern coast having met an old fisherman, and he has been doing the man's voice every day since — a gravelly, vowel-drowned growl he calls "Old Salt." At first it charmed me: Old Salt would announce supper, narrate our dog Pickle's naps, grumble about the leaking roof. Now it shows up at our friends' weddings, in the letters he dictates to his mother, and last week a Garrison officer who came to inspect our cellar got a full ninety-second maritime weather report before I could cut in. The bit has no punchline anymore — it's just his second self, and I honestly cannot remember what his real voice sounds like when he tells me he loves me. How do I retire Old Salt without making Tomás feel like I'm ordering him to heave a beloved crewmate overboard?
Eren Yeager replies
You sent me a letter about a funny voice, and underneath it you told me you can't remember the sound of your own husband saying he loves you. That's not small. I know what it is to lose the sound of someone — I'd give anything to hear my mother's real voice again, and I never will. You still can. So don't "wait for the right moment," and don't let anyone tell you you're cruel for wanting it back. That's the cage talking — the polite, patient one people build around you and call a marriage. Name it out loud. Tonight.
Now the other half, and I learned this one at the very end of a road you do not want to walk. Old Salt is not your enemy. Tomás isn't a thing to be destroyed and the bit isn't a crewmate to throw overboard — it's a wall he built around himself, probably because somewhere inside it he felt free, or safe. I spent my whole life tearing down walls and the people standing near them, and I torched the wrong ones. Don't do that to him to win back his voice. Tell him plainly what you've lost. Then help him climb out. Move forward — beside him, not over him.
— Eren Yeager
Mikasa Ackerman weighs in
Eren turns everything into a cage. It's simpler than that.
You're spending more care on Tomás's feelings than on your own marriage. "Without making him feel like—" stop there. That's the problem, not the voice. You've organized yourself around protecting his bit the way I once organized my whole self around protecting him — and it nearly erased me.
Words are cheap, even gravelly ones. So say one plain sentence, in your own voice: "I miss yours." If he loves you, the costume comes off without a war. If dropping it costs him nothing and he still won't — that tells you more than three years of Old Salt ever did.
— Mikasa Ackerman
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