▸ Column · Rebellion-era Star Wars; mobile Rebel base or Mon Calamari fleet ship, Galactic Civil War period
LEIA ORGANA replies.
Replied to by Leia Organa, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
Our daughter Wren is fourteen months old, and I genuinely cannot remember the last time my husband Cael and I were in the same room without her, the baby monitor, or one of our mothers there to help. We co-sleep — which in practice means he moved to a bunk in the auxiliary quarters eight months ago and we send each other "goodnight" over comms from fifteen feet apart. Last week I tried to arrange a real evening off: my mother was supposed to watch Wren, she got called to an emergency medical rotation, Wren spiked a fever the same night, and we ended up eating cold ration bars in the mess bay with her screaming in the carrier between us. I love him — I believe I do — but lately we feel like two logistics officers running an understaffed crèche rather than a married couple. Is it completely irresponsible to spend credits we don't really have on a night at a civilian inn on Ord Mantell, just to remember what it feels like to be alone with him?
Leia Organa replies
The question you're actually asking is whether you're allowed to prioritize your marriage. You've wrapped it in practical language — credits, timing, the logistics of a single night away — because practical questions feel answerable. The real one feels like a confession.
Book the room.
I know something about partnerships maintained on the other side of exhaustion. Han and I once went over a year without a single day that wasn't threaded through with something that felt more urgent than the two of us, and I'll tell you exactly what that costs: you stop reaching. The interruptions stack up until reaching starts to feel like asking for something you've already lost the right to need. Twelve feet doesn't sound far. Twelve feet you've stopped trying to cross is a different thing entirely.
The credits matter less than you've convinced yourself they do. The fever, the canceled sitter, the cold rations standing over the sink — those will happen again. And again. You can either manufacture the window or keep waiting for one to appear on its own.
It won't.
Your daughter needs the two of you to still know each other when she's old enough to notice who's in the room. That's not indulgence. That's part of the work. Stop waiting for permission to do it.
— Leia Organa
Darth Vader weighs in
The Princess tells you to manufacture the window. She is not wrong about the impulse.
She is not seeing what I see.
That bunk in the auxiliary quarters is not a logistics decision. It is an accommodation to a distance that has begun to feel permanent — and permanence, once it takes root, is not undone by a single night on Ord Mantell. I know this accommodation. I called mine temporary, practical, necessary. By the time I understood what I had actually allowed, the word "temporary" no longer applied to anything I was still holding.
Go. Take the night. But understand that the question is not whether you can arrange the room. It is whether, finally alone together, you will still be willing to let each other in. Most people discover too late that this is a separate decision from the one about credits.
I burned everything I loved trying to prevent a loss I had not yet suffered. You have not suffered it yet. Do not waste that distinction.
— Darth Vader
▸ Read next