▸ Column · Rebel Alliance era — galactic fleet, field-command posting
LEIA ORGANA replies.
Replied to by Leia Organa, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
My husband Cassian and I had a completely normal physical life until he accepted a new field command last autumn — I can date the last time we were intimate to the night before his first briefing, and we've shared quarters for eight months since without him reaching for me once. Every time I try to raise it, he says he's worn out from the new posting or that nothing's wrong, and last week he pulled up a mission log mid-sentence so I'd lose the thread. I've quietly ruled out a health concern, someone else, something I might have done — no evidence for any of it, just this wall of pleasant deflection that's slowly convincing me I'm inventing the whole problem. He still laughs at mess over dinner and kisses my forehead before lights-out, and somehow the warmth makes the silence worse. How do I actually get him to tell me what changed?
Leia Organa replies
Eight months of silence you can date to a single week, and you're asking whether you invented it. You didn't. You can name the night, you've ruled out the obvious explanations, you know what a wall is. Stop letting him talk you out of your own arithmetic.
You keep orbiting the question instead of asking it. Sick? Someone else? Something you did? Those are every route around the conversation that has to happen — and each time you get close, he pulls up a mission log or suddenly needs to be somewhere else, and you let it drop. The wall doesn't stand by itself. You're holding your end.
The forehead kiss, the dinners — I'm not dismissing them. I know what it looks like when someone is genuinely gone, when all that's left is courtesy. I've been in rooms like that. This isn't that. He's still showing up in every way that costs him nothing, which means whatever shut eight months ago is still worth forcing open, not walking around in your own head forever.
Stop asking if everything is alright. That question has an ejector seat. Pick a moment where there's no convenient mission to check on, and say: something changed the night before your posting, it hasn't come back, and I won't keep pretending the wall isn't there. Not a question. A statement that requires an answer.
— Leia Organa
Darth Vader weighs in
The Princess frames this as something that happened to your husband — a door waiting for you to ask him to open. I offer a different reading. I know what that warmth is. The forehead kiss. The laughter. Every tenderness that costs nothing, offered while you have retreated somewhere they cannot follow. He has not lost the way back. He shut the door. I called every such choice "exhaustion," "the demands of the work," and I believed the words because they were far more comfortable than the truth. Do not ask him what changed. Ask him what he decided. That is the question he has been maneuvering around for eight months.
— Darth Vader
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