▸ Column · Attack on Titan — the military era within the Walls, a long-distance bond sustained by letters carried on the supply caravans while Esai is posted to a garrison across the sea.
EREN YEAGER replies.
Replied to by Eren Yeager, with a rebuttal from Mikasa Ackerman.
The letter
I'm thirty-four. For two years now Esai has been posted to the garrison across the sea while I've stayed here inside the Walls, and the whole thing has run on letters carried up by the supply caravans — that, and the little things he still tucks in with them, pressed flowers and festival tokens from a district I've never seen. When it started, the understanding was that one of us would transfer once his tour ended. Last month his tour was extended with no end date, and when I asked what that meant for us, he said what he always says: "we'll figure it out eventually." I love the letters. I'm starting to hate "eventually." My sister says I've made a romance out of a very elaborate pen-pal arrangement — a distance with no finish line. Am I waiting on a future that's actually coming, or am I afraid to admit there isn't one?
Eren Yeager replies
Two years waiting on a man who won't put a date on "eventually." Your sister is closer to right than comfortable people usually are. Hear both halves of this, and keep them apart, because I learned the hard way they don't mix.
First half — the wisdom: you're in a cage, and the lock is a single word, "someday," and it's held by the one person who isn't the one suffocating inside it. The people who tell you to wait are almost never the ones doing the waiting. I stopped asking the world's permission when I was ten, standing in the rubble where it took my mother, and I have never once regretted refusing to wait for it. You're thirty-four. Your one life is not a someday. Move toward what's yours.
Now the half I paid everything to learn: I once decided I knew better than the people I loved what they should want — pushed them away to "spare" them and called it freedom. It wasn't. Don't torch this man out of spite, and don't decide his answer for him the way I decided for others. Ask him plainly, once, for a date. Whatever he gives you — or refuses to — is the door. Walk through it either way.
— Eren Yeager
Mikasa Ackerman weighs in
Eren tells you to take your freedom. He's the one who pushed me away to "spare" me and called it mercy — so be careful whose someday you let a man decide for you. But he skipped the part that matters. Stop weighing the letters and the pressed flowers. Trinkets are cheap. Esai already showed you what he does when staying costs him something: his tour extended, and he chose it, with no date for you. That isn't a future arriving. It's an answer already given. One choice under pressure tells me more than two years of devotion by post. You're not afraid of the truth. You're finally reading the right evidence.
— Mikasa Ackerman
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