▸ Column · Attack on Titan — the walled world of the Survey Corps and interior garrison towns
LEVI ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Levi Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Eren Yeager.
The letter
Nadia and I have had four years together. Last week she came back lit up — she'd been offered a long-range courier posting that'd let us live light, a season in one garrison town, then another, then wherever the roads stay open. The trouble is I'd just put coin down on a narrow brick house in the interior, two streets from my parents, a lemon tree out the back where I'd already pictured children and shared meals. She calls a deed a cage and says I'm choosing an address over a life with her. I say her "us" never has a hearth we both walk back to at night. We're not quarreling about money or whether we love each other — we just want our days to look like opposite things, and I can't find the one of us who's wrong. Do I tear up the deed and follow her down the roads, or let her ride out and admit we were always walking toward different doors?
Levi Ackerman replies
Tch. You've built the question wrong, so of course it won't answer. You've cast yourself as the one who either chases her or gets left — both versions make her the deciding party and you the luggage. Drop that. The only question that's yours is this: if Nadia walked out of the equation tomorrow, which set of days would you still choose? The lemon tree or the road. Answer that one honestly, because it's the part you actually control. Whether the two of you last — that was never in your hands. It isn't now. Quit waiting to find out before you decide; that certainty isn't coming, and people who freeze waiting for it lose both doors. Here's what I know. I came up underground, no house, no lemon tree, nothing two streets from anyone who loved me. So I won't sneer at wanting walls and a meal that's the same every week — that's not surrender, that's a thing some people would bleed for. But choose it because it's yours, not because you're scared of the road. Pick the regret you can carry. Then commit to it like you mean it. Half a choice, hedged, loses her and the house both.
— Levi Ackerman
Eren Yeager weighs in
Levi makes it sound even — house, road, pick your regret. It isn't even. Listen to what you wrote: a lemon tree, your parents two streets over, the same meal every week. That's not a life you chose. That's the cage you were handed, and it's comfortable, which is the most dangerous kind. So the wisdom: go. Don't let safety wearing your mother's face talk you into a slow surrender. But here's the half I paid everything to learn — don't torch your own days to live inside hers, either. Following someone over the edge isn't freedom. Build your own door. Walk through it standing up.
— Eren Yeager
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