▸ Column · Star Wars — Obi-Wan in his desert exile on Tatooine, reading a letter carried to "Ben Kenobi"; the relationship transposed to a two-system long-distance courtship
OBI-WAN KENOBI replies.
Replied to by Obi-Wan Kenobi, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
Esai and I have kept faith across the stars for two standard years — his posting on Lisuva, mine on the cold side of Brevik — and when we began, there was a notion that one of us would make the crossing once his contract ran out. Last cycle the company extended him indefinitely, and when I asked the obvious thing, he only said "we'll sort it out eventually," which is precisely what he has said since the first transmission. I treasure our nightly calls, and he still sends me data-chits from every concert he attends. But I am thirty-four, and I have begun to resent arranging my whole life around a "someday" no one will mark on a calendar. My sister says I am romantic to a fault — that a bond with no end to the distance is just an elaborate pen-pal arrangement. Am I tending a future that is truly on its way, Ben, or am I only afraid to admit there is no there there?
Obi-Wan Kenobi replies
Well. Your sister has a sharp tongue and, I'm afraid, a point worth turning over.
Let me confess something first, since I've no right to examine your waiting without it. I once spent nineteen years in a desert, doing nothing dramatic at all. People would have called it stalling. It was the most important thing I ever did — because it was tending something. I was watching a boy grow toward a future I knew was coming. Patience is not the same as doing nothing, but patience with no object underneath it isn't faith. It's only a comfortable place to hide from a question.
So the question is not whether you are romantic. It's what your waiting is tending. From a certain point of view, "we'll sort it out eventually" is tender. From another, it's a man declining to choose you out loud, year after year — and I once told myself reassuring things about someone rather than look squarely at what he kept showing me. It cost me everything.
Don't make an ultimatum of it; make it honest. Ask him, kindly, for a date. Then watch what he does with the asking. That is your answer, not his words.
— Obi-Wan Kenobi
Darth Vader weighs in
Kenobi counsels you to wait, and watch, and read the answer in time. He always did love the long road. But you already have your answer — you have had it for two years. "We'll sort it out eventually" is not a delay. It is the choice. He is choosing the version of you he can keep at a distance, where nothing is asked of him and nothing can be lost.
I know that hunger to hold a thing without paying for it. I held that way once. The grip closes on nothing.
Stop waiting for him to name the date. Name it yourself — and mean it. Do not seize him. Simply refuse to be kept.
— Darth Vader
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