Chapter Text
Mikasa remembers.
She remembers seeing the gargantuan essay-esque letter. She remembers the rage, the despair she felt. Annie was out of her life. She wanted it to stay that way, and it did, and now half a year later she did what Annie Leonhart always did.
She fucked it up.
She remembers opening the letter and tentatively reading the opening words.
“This is it.
This is the last one.
One last try at… Whatever it is we’re all doing on this floating rock hurdling wildly through space that we call home. A last ditch effort, an all-in bet on fixing it all.
At change.
Everything, everyone, is changing. Always. We’re always all those people we used to be, every last second shaped us to be who we are now, and we like to think that our damage shaped us for the better. That it’s good damage, because if it isn’t, what was it all for? It’d just be damage. More baggage to carry through our lives, another scar to have, like that annoying ache you get from standing too much, like the sting in your lungs from running.
That’s what I do.
I keep on running, for better or for worse, and it gets easier over time. You do it every day, and suddenly that’s just natural.
I heard a wise man say something once: “It all just disappears, doesn't it? Everything you are, gone in a moment, like breath in a mirror."
But that’s not true. Not really. We’re the amalgamation of every moment we were.
You gotta keep moving so long as you remember all the people you used to be. I used to be a child from a broken home, desperately shouldering the burden of a family littered with generational trauma.
A father struggling with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder who wanted to create the perfect child, knowing he had to make tough calls but never realising just how much pain he’d inflict on his child.
A mother who was never there, and when she was, she was cruel.
But it’s not about them. They’re not the reason I am the person I am today.
I am.
I hurt people. Me. I’m just relieved I can stop lying.
Usually there would be some epic, heartfelt, overly dramatic speech about how I am stronger for all those scars, how they are my badge of honor, how the people I hurt have hurt me so in that respect it’s okay, isn’t it?
It’s not.
I’m a little over nine months sober. I hope I’ll stop making those mistakes and finally learn to be more considerate, to not think I’m the main character. I look back at that other Annie and I ask myself…
“Who is that?”
I may have come from a broken home, but as generational trauma does, I broke other homes too.
I used to feel like my whole life was an acting job. Just doing an impression of the people I saw on television, which was just the projection of a bunch of equally screwed-up writers and actors.
I felt like a Xerox of a Xerox of a person.
Like a hollow imitation of what I thought a human was like.
I divided people into “Good” or “Bad”. I was so sure I was a bad person, that this was an immutable fact of life and that I’d never be a good person anyway, so what was the point of trying to be? It let me do anything I wanted without ever worrying or caring about what it did to others.
But that was still me.
I was still the one creating fights everywhere I went, priding myself on my strength and ability to hurt everyone, just so I could feel something. So I could feel like a winner.
If other people hurt me, I had a karmic right to inflict the same damage on others, thus continuing a cycle of violence.
I was still the one who tried to systematically create a rift between two of my exes in a last-ditch effort to steal away from them the happiness I felt they had robbed from me simply by virtue of being together, of being happy.
I was the one who had the audacity, when it all blew up in my face and went exactly the way I didn’t want, to feel hurt. Like I was somehow the one being wronged, and not facing the consequences of my own actions for continuing this cycle.
In a sick way, when I wasn’t wallowing in my own misery about how fucked up my life was, or fetishising my own sadness, i was convinced I was better than everyone else. I would never admit it to myself, much less others, but that was just it.
That was always what it boiled down to.
I felt like my mistakes, the things I did and said to ruin those relationships, weren’t my own. And how dare they be happy with the only other person that existed who could relate?
I went to rehab shortly after. I’d hit my four months, and the only solace I had after you left was an Olivia Rodrigo concert, which in hindsight is a petty thing to find comfort in.
I dyed my hair blue again, just like I always said I would.
I got a job, it isn’t great, but it helps me to not think of you.
Except I do. When I go on my walk every night, and I light a cigarette looking at the stars, all I can think of is how I wanted to take you here so we could gaze at them together.
Every time I try a new restaurant, I wonder to myself how much you’d like it. I imagine the conversations we would have had over mediocre and overpriced pizza.
As I pass the empty, abandoned school in my neighborhood in the dead of night, I look to my side and speak out loud as if you were there. I know you’re not, but I pretend. Even if passers-by must think I’m crazy.
I entered a group, they helped me stay sober. When it was time to make amends, I made a list. I purposely put you on the bottom so that one day, if we ever met again, I could cross your name off last.
I apologized to everyone else.
I got better at drawing, all because I recounted your advice. When I finally mastered hair and ears in art, yours was the first face I drew.
It’s been half a year.
It’s been two years since we met.
I rewatched that movie we bonded over.
And all I could think about was how much I wanted you there.
I may be a writer, but you’re the poem.
You’re the window I gaze out of on my late-night train rides home.
I look at life through lenses in the shape of your eyes.
I’d unthink myself if I knew you’d miss me.
I hoped we’d end up together, outside and past midnight smoking cigarettes together.”
She remembers when she turns the page with a heavy heart, unearthing the back as she doesn’t quite know what to feel.
“My birthday is coming up. At the time of writing, it’s only seventeen days away. It felt like an eternity back when you left. I wished to hear your voice again when I saw a falling star. I wrote songs about how much I missed you.
I’ll be going to college next year, but part of me didn’t want to in the hopes that you’d somehow run into me on the street thanks to a faint hope you remembered my address from buying me that shark.
I know it’s a pipe dream, but we always loved to dream. I realise now I truly am my parents’ child, I was always so good at telling lies, and you were willing to believe all of them on the single virtue of me promising I never lied, while in reality my entire life is one big lie.
A xerox of a xerox of a life.
I can say I’m sorry for a lot of things.
I’m sorry for being an asshole in general, I’m sorry for taking my fucked up life out on you.
I’m sorry for ruining every good thing you ever had because I thought you’d leave me.
I’m sorry for making you feel like my sobriety depended on you. Because it did. I got sober for you, I told you that, and it was a fucked up thing to do.
I’m sorry for expecting you to be there 24/7 to listen to my every thought because I was so desperate for your company that I suffocated you.
I’m sorry for being manipulative and calculating and all around a cartoonish villain always saying how great and smart I was.
I’m sorry for so many more things, each and every last one would be here if I wasn’t afraid of writing too much.
But most of all? I’m sorry for thinking that a romantic relationship was the only point of our being together to the point I kept saying you still wanted me solely to comfort myself.
That’s what it was.
I was saying it because I was telling myself.
My birthday is in seventeen days, and all I can think about is how I don’t want excessive partying. I want you here. With me. One last time.
In my restless dreams I see your face.
I think that… When the three of us were all like that last year? We were all drowning. All three of us were drowning, and we understood each other in a way because of that. As screwed up as we all were, we did understand each other. My mother, she knew what it's like to feel your entire life like you're drowning with the exception of these moments, these very rare, brief instances, in which you suddenly remember you can swim.
All three of us were drowning, and we didn't know how to save each other, but there was an understanding that we were all drowning together. And ultimately, you saved yourselves and each other.
Not me.
Because there are some people you can't save. 'Cause those people will thrash and struggle and try to take you down with them.
I was one of them.
I’m sorry. For all of it. And I love you.”
She wants to be angry. She wants to tear it up, burn the scraps and never think about it again. Go about her life never hearing the name Annie Leonhart again, never hearing about music she likes, never having to endure hour long rants, never enduring getting yelled at and verbally abused for days only to have it blamed on withdrawals as if that was ever an excuse for anything.
It wasn’t.
She doesn’t know how to feel.
She just… Keeps it. Thinking about what to do next.