▸ Column · Hidden Leaf Village (Konohagakure), feudal shinobi era — the period of uneasy peace before the clan tensions erupted.
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Han Solo.
The letter
A kunoichi I've known for two years — I'll call her Hana — has accepted every social gathering I've arranged over that time: a nameday supper at the training grounds, two Festival of Lights dinners, the evening I opened my new lodgings to the team, a midday meal between missions. She has arrived at none of them. A messenger hawk finds me within the hour each time: some version of so sorry, last-minute summons, couldn't get free. The part that makes it so difficult is how genuine she is when I invite her — she doesn't decline politely, she names which rice dish she'll bring and asks whether to arrive before the others. Last month I ordered enough fish for eight people and sent half of it to the market cats because I had counted her among us. When we walk together or take tea between shifts, I genuinely enjoy her company, and I don't wish to stop inviting her. But I cannot keep setting a place at the table for someone who has never once filled it. How do I tell her what she's been doing without it becoming a confrontation, or do I simply stop counting her in the preparations the moment she agrees to come?
Itachi Uchiha replies
I know this pattern from the inside, though from a different angle than you do. I understand how someone can extend warmth in full sincerity and still be unable to close the final distance between intention and arrival — sometimes the person who cannot show up loves the idea of showing up deeply, and that love is genuine, even if their feet cannot follow it. Do not mistake the absence for indifference. It may be exactly the opposite.
But you are not asking me to account for her reasons. You are asking whether to say something, and so I will ask you to look carefully at why you haven't already. The silence you have been keeping — does it protect her from a difficult conversation? Or has it, quietly, become a way of protecting yourself from the risk of being heard wrong? I have some experience with that particular confusion, and I did not resolve it well.
If you care about this friendship — and the tea, the walks, suggest that you do — she deserves to hear, gently and without accusation, what her pattern has cost you. Not an inventory, not a grievance. Simply: you noticed, you kept setting her place, you thought it better to say it aloud rather than begin quietly planning around her. That is not a confrontation. It is the small truth a real friendship can carry.
What it earns you is information: whether she has a reason she hasn't named, whether she even realizes how often this has happened, whether she wishes to change it. Withholding that from her protects nothing. It only keeps you from finding out what the friendship actually is.
— Itachi Uchiha
Han Solo weighs in
Look — Itachi just gave you a full spiritual excavation of what Hana's absence means, and the answer is already sitting in your letter: she's zero for five. Leia used to do the same thing, the whole speech about what behavior reveals about inner truth — and I'd say, princess, sometimes the behavior is just the point. Hana says yes because saying yes costs her nothing. The tea and walks? Real. The RSVP? Theater. Stop ordering fish for eight when you know she's seven. You want to say something? Keep it short: you always say yes and never make it — just hawk me when you're actually free. She'll either show up or she won't. You'll know fast. No revelation required.
— Han Solo