▸ Column · New Republic era, post-Battle of Endor — a galaxy slowly mending from decades of Imperial occupation and war, where families scattered across star systems and long silences between people are often just what that much distance does to you.
LUKE SKYWALKER replies.
Replied to by Luke Skywalker, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
Twenty years ago my father, Daveen, walked out after a fight over my mother's burial rites — she wanted her remains sent home to Corellia, he wanted something faster, something local. Words were said that I'm still not sure either of us meant. I closed the comm channel and swore I'd never open it again. Last month my daughter's school project on family genealogy forced my hand — I sent him one message asking about his grandparents' origins, and we ended up talking for three standard hours, both of us in tears somewhere around the ninety-minute mark. He apologized for things I'd been certain he'd long forgotten he even did. I realized I'd been keeping my anger sharpened like a weapon I'd never switched off, and underneath it — of all the things to miss — I'd missed his terrible jokes. We're meeting at a cantina on Ord Mantell next cycle, halfway between our systems, and I am absurdly nervous. My question is sincere and maybe a little embarrassing: how do I keep one bad afternoon from undoing everything we've just rebuilt, and is it foolish to feel this much hope?
Luke Skywalker replies
The nervousness is right. The hope is right. The question — how do you protect twenty years of reconnection from one bad afternoon — I understand why you're asking it. I asked something like it myself, once.
Everyone I trusted told me my father was gone. Not absent, not lost — gone. Obi-Wan believed it. Yoda believed it. I was a teenager on a desert planet with nothing, and standing in the dark sometimes I almost believed it too. I didn't, because I could feel the part of him that wasn't destroyed yet, and I wasn't willing to call that feeling foolish just because every wise person I knew thought it was.
There was a moment — on a battle station, saber in hand, the anger going through me like it had teeth — where I nearly did what they'd all said I should. I threw the weapon down instead. Not because I had a plan. Because I decided, right then, that one terrible moment wasn't going to be the last word between us.
That's what you're actually asking. Not tactics. Whether you can trust yourself to make that same decision in the cantina when something goes sideways — and something will, in some small way, because reunions are two people who've been different for twenty years finding out who they're talking to now. One clumsy sentence, one silence that goes on too long, isn't the end unless you let it be the end.
You missed his terrible jokes. That's real. That's the thing you carry into Ord Mantell — not the hope that everything will be perfect, but the fact that you missed the man. Those aren't the same, and the second one doesn't break as easy.
— Luke Skywalker
Darth Vader weighs in
My son tells you the hope is the answer. He would.
I know what Daveen carries into that cantina. I know it because I have been Daveen — or something like him. The one who left. The one who finally opened the channel. The one on the wrong side of twenty years trying to account for what he owes and what he simply cannot give back.
He has been rehearsing you the same way you have been rehearsing him. The apologies he actually says will not match the ones you imagined receiving. Neither will the silences. What my son tends to overlook — and he tends to — is that the reunion is not only yours to decide. There are two people at that table, and only one of them is you.
Go. But walk in ready to meet who is actually there, not the father you deserved. He left and he came back, and both of those things will sit across from you at once.
Where Luke is right — and I do not concede this easily — is the part about the decision. One wrong word does not cancel the call. Not if you refuse to let it. Know who you are meeting. That is the only protection worth anything.
— Darth Vader
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