▸ Column · Star Wars, the late Republic — a holozine advice column read across the Mid-Rim, with the housecat adapted into a tooka and the ex-husband into a former bondmate
QUI-GON JINN replies.
Replied to by Qui-Gon Jinn, with a rebuttal from Darth Maul.
The letter
My tooka, Gerald, has never been an affectionate creature, but he endured eleven years of my former bondmate with nothing sharper than the occasional hiss. Three weeks into my courtship with Marco, Gerald has: tipped a full cup of caf into Marco's datapad, taught himself to nudge the sleeping-chamber door open expressly to watch Marco breathe, and carried off Marco's left boot to the refresher waste on four separate occasions — always, only, the left. Last duskwatch Gerald settled directly onto Marco's face at the third hour, which Marco swears was chance, but I have seen this animal's eyes, and I no longer believe in chance. Marco bears it all with maddening grace, which somehow worsens it — I feel I am watching a good man quietly lose a campaign to a small striped beast and politely refusing to admit a campaign is underway. Do I step in, and if so, for whom?
Qui-Gon Jinn replies
Notice what you have already done. You have written the ending — "campaign," "I no longer believe in chance," a war declared on your behalf by a mind that has decided what the creature means. Your focus determines your reality. Look for a strategist and you will find one in every dropped boot.
But here is the one no one in your story is actually watching. Everyone is watching Marco — his grace, his patience, his bruised datapad. No one is listening to Gerald. A creature who suffered eleven years in silence and now, suddenly, will not — that is not malice. That is information. Animals read a room long before the mind permits itself to know what it has already felt.
So I will not tell you whose side to take, because there are no sides. Feel — don't think. Sit in what is real: an unsettled animal, and a man being "impossibly gracious." Is that grace, or is it a performance you have not yet let yourself examine? Gerald may be answering a question you have not asked aloud.
Be mindful of the present. Do not manage a war. Watch the cat. The one everyone overlooks is usually the one the moment is asking you to see.
— Qui-Gon Jinn
Darth Maul weighs in
You ask, on whose behalf. Wrong question. Jinn would have you gaze serenely at the beast and find wisdom in it. I will tell you something simpler.
Gerald was there first. Eleven years he held that ground. Then Marco walked in and you named the cat the problem.
The quiet one. Underestimated. He moves a single boot — the left, always — and waits. They never see it coming. I know the look you describe. It is not madness. It is memory.
Do not shame him into smiling for your guest. He took nothing. Marco came into his territory. Patience is not a crime. Ask, instead, why the intruder's comfort outranks the one who endured.
— Darth Maul
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