▸ Column · Star Wars — Rebellion era; a partner's off-world posting filed without consultation, adapted to shared quarters, a tooka, and a medical corps certification
LEIA ORGANA replies.
Replied to by Leia Organa, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
My partner of four cycles — Doman — accepted a posting on Chandrila last week and told me about it over supper, after the transfer was already filed and stamped. We share quarters on a lease that runs till the next standard year, we're raising a tooka together, and I'm eighteen months into a medical corps certification I can't carry off-world. When I said he'd blindsided me, he shrugged that he'd "assumed I'd come along" because I once said Chandrila looked lovely in a travelogue holo. I love him, and I don't think he set out to wound me. But I can't shake the feeling my whole life was something he'd file under "details, sort later." How do I tell whether this is one bad call I can forgive, or proof he doesn't think my plans are real?
Leia Organa replies
Stop asking whether to forgive the dinner. That's the comfortable question. The one you're circling is sharper: when it cost him nothing to wait and ask, he didn't — he filed the transfer, then informed you. That's not a man being cruel. That's a man showing you the weight he assigns your life when he thinks no one's grading. Believe the arithmetic, not the apology.
But don't sentence him from one supper either. Here's the test that actually matters — I've staked everything I love on it. Put the decision back on the table, with you in the room this time, and watch what he does when keeping you costs him the posting. Does he reopen it? Does he treat your certification as real as his contract, or as the thing that bends? I bicker with a man who's infuriating and stubborn and mine, and not once has he made my work the detail. When it cost him, he showed up. That's the line.
So: name it to Doman plainly, then make him choose in front of you. His answer is your answer. Don't you dare abandon eighteen months of your own future to go find out from the cargo hold.
— Leia Organa
Darth Vader weighs in
The General speaks of tests and posts. She knows a thing or two about a world treated as someone else's detail — I made certain of that, once, and there is no apology long enough for it.
But hear the danger she names too lightly. You are afraid of losing him. That fear will whisper that you should fold your whole life small and follow, to keep him. I know that whisper. I obeyed it. I burned everything I was to hold one person — and lost her in the holding. The one who files your future under "later" has shown you his hand. Do not answer by erasing your own. Stay at your post. It is the only thing he cannot sign away.
— Darth Vader
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