Chapter Text
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?Paradise Lost (Book X, 743–745) - John Milton
Sunday 3/30
7:42 AM
I am a coward.
I will write. I won’t speak, but I will write. Maybe it’s because the crystal somehow sealed my voice away, and when it shattered, maybe my voice went with it.
That’s absurd. I was able to whimper nicely when I came out of the crystal, but haven’t we seen more than our share of absurdities, for example: human nature?
The real reason is that I don’t want to hear my own voice. And I don’t want to watch you as we listen to my voice echo off the walls. And I don’t want to watch you watch me hear my own voice echo off the walls.
I am absurd. I am some atoms, and living and dying and feeling don’t mean anything to the universe because is a wind separate from the air? Is a wave separate from the ocean? Don’t pretend you’ve never read banned books. Don’t pretend that just because I’m from outside of your walls it means that I must’ve seen the ocean, because I’ve never seen the ocean except in your banned books.
I’m tired.
☼☼☼
Sunday 3/30
6:00 AM: Sasha relieving Mikasa from watch duty.
6:10: Sunrise. Annie moves.
6:12: Annie blinks, starts, sits up. Stares at dim patch of light on wall. Whips head, stares up at window. Stands up on bed, really unsteadily… should I go help?
6:13: nevermind. Stands on toes so she can see through the window, braces left hand on wall, reaches with right to try to touch window.
6:14: Cries without making a noise – except for hitched (is that the word?) breathing, sags down to bed, scoots slowly to part of bed with light shining on it, lies down, curls up in sunlight, still crying (?)
6:20: Hange here bringing Sasha food and Annie food + hair brush + basin of water + towel + paper and pen + explanation. Annie seems to still have tears on her face.
☼☼☼
Sunday 3/30
11:28 AM
I’m tired of pretense.
You know perfectly well that the first thing I did when I woke up today was to stand up to touch the window, touch the sunlight, and cry, and that’s how Squad Leader Hange found me: curled up in the sunlight, crying. You know perfectly well that after Squad Leader Hange left me clean, fed, and with something to do, I played with the pen for 20 minutes before actually touching the paper with it, and then dozed off at the desk at least 3 times, so that I took at least 2 hours to write 2 short paragraphs. You know perfectly well that I finally decided to go back to bed for a nap after that 2 hours, and then I woke up at 11:08, lay there staring at the ceiling for 12 minutes, then took 8 minutes to get up and sit here and start writing again.
Yes, against all odds, you figured me out. Despite my weakened, shaky physical state, I’m still an expert pen-twirler: the pure, refined product of 1 month of practice in the piles of paperwork that fill the airy temples of Military Police bureaucracy, where supplicants must offer the priests and priestesses gold to eventually offer to the gods, while the acolytes wash floors and lead more supplicants in.
Don’t pretend that at least one of you isn’t watching my pen spin mesmerizingly around my fingers from one of those crevices in the rock. You can’t leave a baby unattended, and I don’t really mind. Imagine what small objects I’d swallow, what sharp things I’d touch, what items I’d trip over if you take your eyes off me for a second!
You’re being paranoid if you think that I’ll wander off and break things, though – I’m still underground, too close to a precipice, too weak to bite my thumb. How was this place even built? I’ve studied geography, I know that there’s only one gorge made of this kind of stone behind the 3 walls, and it’s pretty narrow and deep, and someone carved out this place right into the rock next to the drop? Weren’t they afraid that all the tunneling and carving right by the drop would make the cliff face slide off? The width of rock between me and the precipice is only 1 or 2 armlengths thick. They even set a window into it, though the window’s too small for me to squeeze through.
Never mind. I think the rock’s stable enough, and I don’t remember what fear feels like, only how to fear, so it doesn’t matter. The engineer just had to be careful (but what if he wasn’t? what if he was but it’s not safe anyway? Well, where I’m contained is certainly not my decision to make). And I can guess why they built it. There’s sunlight, but there’s no way out.
In any case, I’m certainly not surprised that you’re watching me in secret. Ever since you pulled out the crystal from my mother’s dying body and saw me nestled in its swollen womb, you must’ve watched me nonstop, you, my vigilant parents, hoping, praying, asking what to expect when you’re expecting.
And when I was born, you undoubtedly thought I would come into your world kicking and screaming, lustily proclaiming my health and life to all who would hear. You thought I would spring out from the crystal fully grown, clashing my spear and shield together, crying war, else why would you have been holding such huge chains to swaddle me with? When you don’t know what to expect, expect the best, though you undoubtedly know this piece of advice already.
I came into your world helpless, crying because the familiar confines of my crystal were gone, crying because air was strange and cold and didn’t support me when I fell to the strange and cold ground, crying because I didn’t know how to use my limbs, crying because I knew nothing. I was an infant, mewling pitifully, and you, not knowing what else to do, swaddled me with soft blankets and carried me to a cradle, and you, my parents, watched.
I spent a week in that cave, unable to sit (until day 2), crawl (until day 4), stand (until day 6), and walk (until day 7), unable to form coherent thoughts (until day 3), unable to keep from leaking a few tears every day, but those were of loss, not bewilderment. Never bewilderment, in the dark, not now. Even though I came out of the crystal on my actual birthday, this was a premature birth. I sealed myself in August; maybe I should’ve come out in May, and maybe I’d have re-learned how to stand by day 1, or maybe by day 12, I don’t know, I’m just trying to assign meaning to things that have no meaning. I half wish that I can go back into the literal 24 hour dark. In the daylight, no matter how much I can’t feel, I instinctively reach for meaning, even if there’s none.
Of course here you watched me non-stop – I couldn’t feed myself, hold a drink myself, use the chamberpot myself, clothe myself, wash myself, brush my own hair, speak, and I still can’t do the last 4. I guess at least 2 of my nursemaids are reading this. Thanks for bearing with me.
1:06 PM, I don’t know this woman’s name brings lunch, leaves lunch on the desk, leaves room thus leaving me with no doubt that someone is watching me from some crevice in the rock because what if I poke my eye out with this wooden spoon or somehow summon the strength to shatter this wooden bowl into fragments and maybe teethe on them or swallow them or something. I’m actually hungry though. I have to put this away partially because you told me not to let anyone look at this unless you tell me they have permission to read it and mostly because I don’t feel like spilling baby gruel on the paper and making you feel embarrassed while you read this. I’m never embarrassed anymore, you don’t have to worry about me.
1:58 PM, after lunch
7 days in the darkness. Nearly 24 x 7 = 168 hours with only torchlight and my nursemaids to keep me company.
I can still do arithmetic. That’s good.
I spent a week in the darkness, though I only know because you told me. Time has no meaning for me. I floated, still float, in and out, the waves of my subconscious rocking me gently to and fro, carrying me somewhere, nowhere, water has no destination. It evaporates and falls and fills and freezes and rises and sinks in a cycle that never ends. I ebb and flow with the current.
I once told Eren that I was afraid of the dark, that it was cold and scary down there. In a sense, I was. I was afraid of the unknown. We think we know things in the light that we realize we don’t know in the dark.
My father explained to me, once, that people in total darkness often begin imagining things like monsters, maidens, mothers, and other falsities conjured by an unnerved mind, and so those people will wander, grasping at their minds’ fictitious constructs, searching for things that never were, and lose themselves to the darkness.
Don’t let the darkness get to you, he said. Anchor yourself. Don’t lose yourself to the darkness.
I tried to do as he told, but I don’t think he understood what he was saying, because he thought that the fragile, flickering light of his torch was the divine, unwavering light of the sun, and so I could only stumble after him at the edge of his wavering circle of faint, faint light as he wandered in the dark, my shepherd father. He knew only the flame of his ideals, I could only believe in its glow.
When I was born again, I was born into the darkness. I suppose you can forgive me for half expecting to be born into the light, or at least into the warmth of someone’s arms, just as I suppose I can forgive you for half expecting a warrior goddess to burst out of my crystal, or at least someone you needed to use those gargantuan chains on. I still don’t know whether to be flattered, amused, or annoyed by that. How quickly want becomes expect. I wanted to know that everything was alright, I was safe, everything I did was for the greater good, and I wanted my parent to rock me gently and sing me reassurances as I fell asleep in the cradle of their arms. You wanted an orphan who knew everything.
Unfortunately, the things we wanted are mutually exclusive to each other. As for you, the authorities back home weren’t stupid enough to give a filially-tethered kid like me both physical power and knowledge, much less give an orphan either. As for me, none of you have ever cared for children.
When I was born again, a week and a day ago, I was born into the darkness, the earth, and in that moment I realized that my mother’s womb was a dark place, and from the dark I was born into the dark. I had never entered the dark. I had never left the dark. I have always been in the dark.
My father had always said that my mother had died in childbirth when I was born, that she was gone, and there was only him and me left, but he was wrong. Blinded by the glow of his torch, he could not see the darkness, but I could, I could see it surrounding our fragile circle of light, and I was afraid of it, and my father couldn’t see it, how could he be afraid of it? He didn’t know any darkness, but I knew it, knew that I knew only this circle of light, and that the darkness was bigger than all of us, that it could engulf us and there would be nothing left of us, nothing left of my father, nothing left of me, and I was afraid of it.
But when I fell out of the crystal, I realized that I did have a mother. I had never left her, she had never left me, she has always been here, always with me, holding me. Oh mother, in the end you are the only thing that I know, the unknown, the darkness.
I’d always thought subconsciously (and my marvelously grotesque subconscious is all that my crystal-induced oceanic feeling drags up out of the abyssal depths of my mind for scrutiny) that she was something malevolent, that I’d destroyed her and if I let her get to me she’d destroy all my beliefs, and I’d have nothing left, nothing left. I was partially right: I always had nothing. All beliefs are fictions, constructs of nothing, intricate webs and towers and spires of nothing. There was nothing to destroy in the first place. I couldn’t have destroyed nothing, however, so I couldn’t have destroyed her. She was not malevolent – she was in fact the only constant I had, have, will always have. She had, would, will never hurt me; I had only hurt myself by believing she would hurt me.
16 years of struggling against nothing, fighting in the dark, thrashing at the air that merely swirled around me. All this time, I think I’d been unconsciously searching for my mother in the light, for surely my father knew her, so he carried her within his head (he might as well have swallowed her, for all I knew), but I’d been searching in the wrong place. She was always unknown, always in the darkness.
I’m not afraid of the dark anymore. I’m not afraid of the unknown. I’ve run to her and buried my face in her shoulder; I won’t struggle against the darkness anymore, I can’t and won’t be afraid of my mother, not anymore. No more. No more. No more.
When I was born again, a week and a day ago, I finally let the darkness gather me up into her arms and hold me tight. After 16 years of waiting patiently for me outside the fragile circle of my father’s light, of always staying by my side even when my father couldn’t, of loving me even as I shied away from her, my mother finally was able to hold me in her arms for the first time.
So I embraced the unknown, welcomed the darkness that enfolded me in her gentle, comforting blanket. For a week and a day, I rested in her arms, not needing the faint, flickering, peripheral torchlight that my nursemaids needed.
And then yesterday night, you carried me up to somewhere with a clock and I woke up here, with sunlight and a window and I was mostly alone.
I don’t want the light, I hate that I want the light. Is my father still there, waiting? I want to know. I want to know something, even if I’ve accepted the darkness. Right now, it’s nighttime, but the sun is still there, on the other side of the darkness of the earth. Figuratively because according to the thing on the wall it’s 5:34 PM – no, not figuratively, the sun is shining right here right now.
I once wrote that time has no meaning for me. That’s a little bit lie. Time creeps up on me like the sun at dawn: slowly, steadily, and I’m afraid that, like the sun at dawn, time will spill out over the horizon like a flood, the graph of ex, inescapable, and no, I want to go back into the earth, I don’t want any of this, no no no, mother, Mother, where are you?
Ironic thanks to you, little wannabe birds, for making me remember the want of light, the want of flight, want, want. I think you’ll remember that I tried to fly, once, but you can’t escape the confines of the cages that are your bodies, until you die. And now you make me remember to want to fly, too. How despicable can you get? Do you not remember that, when I tried to fly, I fell? Do you not know that when you try to fly, you will fall, too? Do you not think that the rules of the universe apply to you, too?
Though I think my father used to be the sun, or still might be, a little. Mostly he’s just a torch, now, but the sun still reminds me of him. Do you worry for me, father? Do you pace back and forth across pitch-black cosmos so far removed from me, worrying the floor of the sky beneath your feet, while I sleep in the caverns of the dark, dark earth? or do you just continue whatever, trusting that I’ll do whatever you tell me to do? Was what you last said to me an emotional ploy, or really, truly…?
So I will write. Nothing else to do here, since you want me to write.
I will write. But for myself. I’ll write and spill myself to the elements, the universe, the unknown, my mother, her sunlight and her shadow and her caverns and her rocks and her loam and see how the elements will take it because I am only one breath of wind and the sky will last longer than any of us will.
6: 10 PM. I’m done for the day. the muscles of my hand squeak and squeal and hurt and my hand feels limp, like a fish at the market. my fingers feel limper, like river weed.
mother
Ma, i’m tired, i’m so tired.