▸ Column · Attack on Titan — within the Walls, among the Survey Corps and the families who feed them
MIKASA ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Mikasa Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
My husband's sister Hessa has now sworn she'd come and then failed to appear at four gatherings in a row — our boy's name-day, a harvest supper I spent three days cooking for after rations finally loosened, a homecoming for soldiers back from beyond the Wall, and a feast last week. Every time, within the hour it begins, a note arrives: "So sorry — something came up." But two weeks out she always agrees, warmly, like she means it. So I buy the extra food and lay her place anyway, every single time. My husband says I should "just stop counting on her," which costs me nothing real and fixes nothing — I've still wasted coin we don't have and, worse, the hope I kept feeding looking forward to seeing her. I've never said anything, because she's his blood and I won't tear the family over a missed supper. But swallowing it isn't working either. Is there a kind way to tell someone their "yes" is worth nothing — or do I just quietly move her to a permanent "maybe" in my head and say nothing forever?
Mikasa Ackerman replies
Your husband is right that you should stop counting on her. He just stopped one step short of the part that matters. The food isn't the loss. The loss is that you keep handing her your hope two weeks out, and four times now she's shown you what she does with it.
Words are cheap. She says yes warmly because saying yes costs her nothing. The test was always whether she'd come when coming was inconvenient. She's answered that four times. That is your answer.
I've stood beside people who came back for me when coming back could have gotten them killed. Measured against that, someone who can't cross the district for a supper isn't a puzzle. She's just someone whose conduct already told you who she is.
So stop hunting for a graceful sentence. A speech doesn't change that.
Lay no place for her. Cook for the people who walk through your door. If she comes, there's room. If the note arrives at the hour again, you've lost nothing, because you stopped betting.
Say one plain thing if you want — "I'll see you if I see you" — and mean it. But don't mistake saying it for the fix. The fix is you stop arranging your heart around someone who never shows up to hold it.
— Mikasa Ackerman
Alexstrasza weighs in
Mikasa is right that her conduct has spoken, dear one — but do not bolt the door behind her as you set her aside. A woman who agrees with real warmth and then cannot make herself come is seldom careless. More often she is drowning in something she has not named to you — shame, dread, a grief she cannot carry into a bright room full of happy faces. I have watched the strong vanish rather than be seen breaking. The food you laid out was never wasted; love offered freely is no debt owed back. Keep your table. And one quiet day, ask her not why she failed to come — but what she is so afraid of. The answer may have nothing to do with your suppers at all.
— Alexstrasza
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