▸ Column · The Hidden Leaf shinobi world — a long-term posting to a distant northern hidden village in place of an Oslo research fellowship
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
I've shared four years and a home-to-be with a fellow shinobi from my village. Last week he told me — the night before the scroll was due back — that he'd accepted a two-year posting to a far northern hidden village. Not a conversation. An announcement, over cold rice. We'd been choosing a house together; I'd already put down the deposit and started picking which wall would be ours. He says he kept it quiet so he "wouldn't burden me" while he waited to hear back. But he sent his application in spring, and then watched me measure rooms for two months without a word. I don't think he's cruel — he simply cannot stand inside a hard conversation. But I can't escape the feeling that four years of "us" wasn't even counted in the largest choice of his life. Do I try to hold this across the distance, or did the way he told me already answer the question?
Itachi Uchiha replies
You have already heard the most important thing he said, and it was not the posting. It was the reason he gave for his silence. "So I wouldn't burden you." I know that sentence intimately, friend. I have spoken it. And I have learned to ask of it the one question that matters: did the silence protect the other person — or only the one keeping it?
When I held my truths from someone I loved, I told myself it was to shield him. Some of it was. But a part of it, I confess, only spared me from being seen, from sitting in the discomfort of his eyes. That part was not love. It was cowardice wearing love's robe. Watching you paint a wall he had already decided to leave behind — that was not protection. You were owed the truth while it could still have been carried together.
So do not measure this by the eight time zones. Measure it by whether he can learn to stand inside the hard conversation he fled, because distance only magnifies what avoidance already is. And do not hold "us" together alone, across an ocean, as a sacrifice. A burden borne by one to spare a person who never asked it is not devotion. Grieve, yes — that grief is proof he mattered. But ask him for the truth, and watch whether he can finally give it.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
Itachi will let you keep your kind story. I won't. "He's not malicious, just can't sit with hard conversations." That's the lie you've organized around — the one you never thought to question. I built my whole life on a story like that and it was the exact opposite of the truth.
Stop interpreting him. Look at what he did. He made the largest choice of his life, watched you spend money on a future he'd already cancelled, and said nothing. The handling is the answer. You already know it — you wrote the line yourself: you weren't a variable.
Don't pour two years across an ocean to prove his cowardice wrong. That's not loyalty. That's a wound you'd rename devotion. Hn.
— Sasuke Uchiha
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