▸ Column · Outer Rim docking-town, the quiet years after the Empire's fall — Luke answering as the Jedi who reconciled with his own father
LUKE SKYWALKER replies.
Replied to by Luke Skywalker, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
My father pinged my comm last week for the first time in twenty years, and I nearly let it drop because the channel wasn't in my contacts. We hadn't traded a word since we screamed at each other over my aunt Lorna's pyre when I was twenty-three. I built a whole life on the assumption he was simply gone — a wife, Imani, two kids, a grain-cake stall down on the docking row that finally turns a profit. He broke down on the line and told me he'd saved every flimsi clipping about the stall in a battered box under his bunk. I found myself crying right back into the flour on my apron. We're meeting for caf on Saturday, and I'm terrified and giddy at once, like a kid before a first courtship. How do I honor this without pretending the twenty years never happened — and how do I keep my heart from sprinting so far ahead that I forget to actually listen to him?
Luke Skywalker replies
I almost let my father go too. Everyone I trusted told me he was gone, and I had better reasons than an unsaved channel to let it ring out — they were calling him a monster, and they weren't entirely wrong about what he'd done. You picked up anyway. That's already the whole thing, the choice most people never make.
Don't pretend the twenty years away. They happened. They built the wife and the kids and the stall he clipped out of the feeds and hid under his bunk. That box is him telling you he was watching the whole time he stayed silent — couldn't say it, but couldn't stop looking. Let that mean something without letting it erase the pyre.
Here's what I learned sitting across from mine at the very end: the racing heart isn't the enemy. I was terrified too. Being afraid isn't the failure — what you do next is. So go in with your hands open and your eyes open, both. Listen more than you rehearse. You don't have to forgive everything Saturday. You don't have to decide anything Saturday. You just have to be the one who stayed at the table — and you already proved you can. You answered.
— Luke Skywalker
Darth Vader weighs in
The boy speaks of open eyes and the pyre you must not erase. Listen instead to the one who reached out twenty years too late — for I am the father in this, not the child.
Yours kept a box of clippings. I kept nothing but silence I called necessary, and I did not break it until I was dying on a cold platform, begging my son to look on me with his own eyes. He did not make me settle the account first. That mercy is the only reason the man under the mask died free.
Do not lay a ledger across that table. He is afraid he will die with it unspoken. Let the caf be caf. The reckoning can wait. He cannot.
— Darth Vader
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