▸ Column · Post-apocalyptic walker-era settlement (Alexandria-like), a fighter home from two long militia campaigns
RICK GRIMES replies.
Replied to by Rick Grimes, with a rebuttal from Negan.
The letter
I rode out with the militia for two long stretches and came home to our settlement about a year and a half ago, but the man who walked back through that gate isn't the one my kids buried in their memory. My girl, Soraya, was seven when I left — she's near ten now, and when I so much as raise my voice she goes small and flinches, then says sorry like she's the one who did wrong. My boy, Niko, just shrugs and disappears into his room. Last week at supper he called me "sir," half a joke, and I had to step outside before he saw what it did to my face. My wife keeps saying, "Just be their father again." I don't know how to find that man under the jumpiness and the nights I wake up with my heart hammering like there's a herd at the wall. How do I build a bridge back to two children who feel like polite strangers in my own house, when I'm still half a stranger to myself?
Rick Grimes replies
I came out of a long sleep into a world that had already carried my boy, Carl, somewhere I couldn't follow, and then I made it worse — I put a gun in his hand too young because I told myself the world demanded it, and I watched him learn to look at me like he was measuring how much of his daddy was left. So I'm not advising you from clean hands. I've been the thing my own kid was scared of.
Here's what I learned over more graves than I'll name: you're chasing the wrong man. The fella who left don't exist anymore, and burning yourself down hunting for him just teaches Soraya that flinch is right. Stop reaching back. Reach down. Get on the floor at their level over something small and stupid — fixing a fence, splitting a tomato three ways for Judith and the boy. No speeches.
Let 'em see the cost on you. Not the rage — the part that still hurts. Niko called you "sir" to find out if there's a man in there who'll feel it. There is. You walked outside to hide it. Walk back in and let him see it instead. That's the bridge. You build it ugly, slow, one ordinary supper at a time, and you forgive yourself out loud where they can hear it.
— Rick Grimes
Negan weighs in
Leave it to Rick to tell a haunted man to go feel his feelings on the floor by a tomato. Buddy — I lost the one person who made me soft, so trust me when I say there's no old you to dig up. Quit looking. Your kid called you "sir" because right now that's all you are: a stranger with no rules. Kids don't need your tears, sweetheart, they need your same. Same face, same calm, same yes-means-yes every single day. Soraya flinches because your weather changes. Make yourself boring and predictable for thirty straight days — show up identical, no big confessions — and watch the flinch die. Be a man they can set a clock by. That's the bridge. Reliability, not sobbing.
— Negan
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