▸ Column · Inside the Walls — a peacetime residential lane in the Trost District, Attack on Titan
MIKASA ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Mikasa Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
It started in spring, when my neighbor Gerald set out a pair of carved wooden cranes that spin in the wind. To even things out, I planted a tall straw effigy I'd haggled down to nothing at market. Gerald answered with an iron weathervane rooster the size of a hunting dog, so I commissioned a ring of little clay frogs hunched over a card table, and now it's six weeks on and the front of my house looks like a folk shrine that fired its caretaker. My wife says I have to stop. But Gerald just mounted a clapper-bird that rattles and shrieks whenever a cart rolls past, and I can't in good conscience let that stand. Is it too far to commission a painted windmill — eight feet, a mural of a frog playing cards against a rooster — or is that the kind of thing I'll regret when it's time to sell the house?
Mikasa Ackerman replies
Six weeks. A roof over your head, a wife inside it, no one at your door who means you harm. Do you understand what most people would trade for that?
Gerald isn't a threat. He's a man with too much time and a weathervane rooster. So whatever this is, it isn't a battle, and you don't get to call your part of it defense. You're feeding it because the feeding feels good. Set that down. It's smaller than you are.
Here's the only conduct in your letter that tells me anything true. Your wife asked you to stop. Not Gerald — your wife. The one who's actually yours. Words are cheap; I watch what people do when someone they love asks something of them. Right now you're spending your days, your coin, and your name in the district out-shrieking a man who shrieks clapper-birds at carts — while the person who shares your home stands in the yard asking you to come back.
Don't commission the windmill. Take the yard down to something she can stand beside without flinching. The world takes what's yours without warning. Don't be the one handing it away over a frog playing cards.
— Mikasa Ackerman
Alexstrasza weighs in
Oh, little one, hers is the wiser counsel — but mind the one thing she stepped past. This is not war you wage on Gerald. It is delight. Two grown men signaling across a fence in the only language pride allows them, and neither will say the word "friend" first. I have watched ages curdle into true hatred; this is its sweet opposite. So do not tear it all down in shame. Mikasa is right that your wife must not be left standing alone in that yard — so bring her into the laughing. And carry your frog windmill to Gerald's door yourself. The rivalry was always an invitation. Answer it as one.
— Alexstrasza
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