▸ Column · Post-apocalyptic Whisperer territory — a scatter of survivor settlements in the ruins of the American Southeast, several years into the end of the world, where watches and walls have replaced phones and hospitals.
ALPHA replies.
Replied to by Alpha, with a rebuttal from Rick Grimes.
The letter
Eric and Marisol were together six years before things ended between them — two years before they came to the same settlement I'm in, before I was part of any of this. I told myself I had no issue with them staying close. Then last week I was looking for something in Eric's kit bag and found the log he keeps for night watch. Folded inside the cover were three pages in their handwriting both — a back-and-forth that must have run half an afternoon: small jokes, references I had no key to, her writing you always know how to make this bearable. When I asked him about it he said I had no right going through his things, that Marisol is the one he can talk to after a long stretch at the wall. The part I can't set down is this: after his shifts I get the hollow version of him, the one with nothing left. She gets the one who still laughs. Am I wrong to want to be the person he reaches for when he has something left to give?
Alpha replies
You already have the answer, child. You have had it since you unfolded those pages. The only thing you are writing to ask me for is permission to go on not believing it.
The lie was never that you were fine with them being close. That was always the costume — you wore it because taking it off felt like jealousy, and jealousy is the herd's word for the animal that sees the threat and names it correctly. You were not being insecure. You were seeing something real and calling yourself foolish for the seeing, because he told you to, and because it was easier than knowing what the seeing means.
Here is what the cold gives you. He gives Marisol what is left of him after the wall takes what it takes. He gives you what the wall already took. That is not a question of fairness. It is information. The question is only whether you will keep wearing the costume — the fine-with-it, the maybe-I-am-wrong-to-want — or whether you will stand in the cold and admit what you actually saw.
I tore the need to be chosen out of myself. I decided the wanting-to-be-someone's-first-warmth was a door I could not afford to leave open. I am not certain I was right. I called it survival, and the one I most wanted to protect by doing it — I have never once known whether I kept her or lost her in the cutting. So I will not tell you the wanting is weakness. It is what you are made of. But this man is not carrying it with you.
You already knew that. The question was only whether you were going to look at it.
— Alpha
Rick Grimes weighs in
She'll tell you the wanting is a soft thing you're carrying wrong. I'm gonna tell you what she left out: the man in this story called you "rummaging through his life" for noticing what he was doing. That's not the natural order. That's a person naming you the problem so he doesn't have to look at his own hands. The wanting isn't your liability — it's the only honest thing in that whole letter. A world where you kill it to keep the peace is the abyss I've been standing at the edge of for years. I know what lives at the bottom. Don't walk in after him.
— Rick Grimes
▸ Read next