▸ Column · Walled Paradis, Year 854-era; domestic life beyond the Survey Corps, adapted from a Bavarian beekeeper documentary to a traveling market merchant from the southern farming regions.
EREN YEAGER replies.
Replied to by Eren Yeager, with a rebuttal from Mikasa Ackerman.
The letter
Three years ago my husband Calix watched a single afternoon of a traveling merchant perform at market — the man kept bees and had this thick southern-region drawl and exactly one joke about how "ze bees, zey know" — and Calix has been doing that voice ever since. At breakfast, during comrades' burial ceremonies, most memorably in an evaluation meeting with my daughter's training instructors. It started as a riff. It has since calcified into a second self he switches into roughly forty times a day, same wheeze, same punchline, unchanged since Year 854. Our friends Miriam and Udo stopped including us in their evening gatherings, and last week that voice answered when my mother called about her surgery. I have tried laughing, not laughing, and once quietly miming something I am not proud of. He insists a bit this perfected is "an investment, not a habit." Is it unreasonable to want my actual husband back, or do I owe the beekeeper his honey?
Eren Yeager replies
What you're describing is a man who found a mask that fit and decided to stop taking it off. I know what that looks like from the inside — I was the one wearing it.
He says it's an investment. That's what you tell yourself when you've decided the thing you've put on is better than whatever was underneath — when the performance becomes easier to live inside than the actual self. Your mother called about her surgery and he handed her the bee farmer. That's not a bit anymore. That's a man hiding behind one, and the hiding has gone so deep he doesn't register the cost every time it lands on you.
Two halves to this, because I've earned the right to know where the road goes.
First half: you're not wrong to want him back. The cage he's in is a cage he built and keeps choosing. You're allowed to name that, plainly and without apology.
Second half is mine to own: when the people I loved couldn't find me anymore, I told myself what I was becoming was necessary — that it was even for them. I was wrong, and that wrongness cost everyone around me things I cannot walk back. He doesn't need burning down. He needs someone who loves him enough to say it once, without softening it: I can't find you in there. Come back.
Whether he does is what you'll learn next.
— Eren Yeager
Mikasa Ackerman weighs in
Eren turned that into his own confession. He does that.
Your mother called about her surgery and got the bee farmer. That's not a stage-fright slip — that's who your husband is when the moment asks something of him. I watch what people do when it costs them, not what they say about their investments. Three years is a long ledger.
You've spent three years laughing, not laughing, managing this. That's the part I'd sit with. You're running an adjustment campaign on an adult who is not confused about what he's doing. He knows. The question is whether what the surgery call cost you is worth stopping for, in his calculation.
That's not a cage. It's a choice he keeps making.
— Mikasa Ackerman
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