▸ Column · Within the Walls — married life in a cramped interior-district household, Attack on Titan era
EREN YEAGER replies.
Replied to by Eren Yeager, with a rebuttal from Levi Ackerman.
The letter
My husband Soren and I have shared the same cramped quarters in the interior district for six years, and somewhere in the last one we lost the ability to disagree without the whole stairwell hearing it. It starts over nothing — last week it was whether to waste the last of the good lamp oil on an ordinary night — and twenty minutes later we're both shouting, hauling up grievances from three winters back, and the old woman below is jabbing the floorboards with her broom handle. The cruel part is we agree on nearly everything. We just can't walk through the door of a conversation without one of us slamming it. Now I flinch every time he clears his throat to bring something up, and I catch him bracing too. How do two people who genuinely love each other learn to argue at a normal volume?
Eren Yeager replies
The lamp oil isn't the fight. You know that. The fight is three winters of things you've each been holding behind your teeth, and the oil is just the first thing small enough to slam the door open. So stop staring at the oil.
Here's the half I'd stake my life on: the cage isn't the shouting. It's the flinching. You've started bracing when he so much as clears his throat — both of you standing guard in your own home, guessing at each other through a wall you built yourselves. That wall is the enemy. Walk through the door and say the actual thing, the real thing, before it's grown teeth. Don't wait for a calm year that's never coming.
Now the half I paid everything for. When I couldn't say the real thing to someone I loved, I decided for her. Pushed her away. Called it protecting her. It was just me, choosing alone, and naming it mercy. And dredging up three winters to win an argument — that's not honesty, that's reaching for a blade against someone who never caged you. I did the bigger version of that. It freed no one. Say the truth. Don't aim it.
— Eren Yeager
Levi Ackerman weighs in
Tch. He's making your stairwell into a war. It isn't one.
You don't "learn" to argue quietly. You decide to, and you do it — your own voice is the one thing in that room actually in your hands. The old woman with the broom is right.
Forget the buried three winters. Eren reaches for the past because he can't leave anything alone; that's how he ended up where he ended up. The question's simpler. Is Soren someone you'd choose again, knowing him? If yes, then act like it — clean, committed, no theatrics over lamp oil. If no, that's a different conversation, and a quieter one.
Pick. Then keep it clean.
— Levi Ackerman
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