▸ Column · Coruscant residential mid-levels, Star Wars galaxy
LEIA ORGANA replies.
Replied to by Leia Organa, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
Ryn and I broke up six weeks ago but we're still locked into our lease on a mid-levels flat until next spring. Neither of us can afford the rent solo. We looked into breaking it early — it's almost 2,000 credits, which neither of us has. So now we're roommates who used to be something else. I'm in the bedroom, he's on the foldout, and we've taped a chore schedule to the kitchen wall like everything's fine (it is not fine). Last week he brought someone home. Laughed all night on his side of the flat. I sat in my room feeling like I was going to crawl out of my skin. We split groceries to the last credit on a shared datapad, say "morning" in the hallway, and pretend the other one is furniture. I don't know. How do I survive eight more months of this?
— Grounded in Coruscant
Leia Organa replies
"Survive" is the wrong word. And somewhere you already know it.
Eight months is a timeline, not a life sentence. The question you're asking — how do I get through this — is the question of someone who's decided they're waiting. Stop waiting.
I know something about living in proximity to everything you've lost. After Alderaan I had a command deck and a fleet that didn't care how much I was breaking. So I led. Grief and function are not opposites — you carry one while you do the other, or you do neither.
What you built — the chore chart, the shared datapad, the "morning" in the hallway — that's a functional life assembled inside grief. Most people can't manage it. The problem isn't the structure. The problem is you built it in his service, to keep the peace, instead of building something that's yours.
The night he brought someone home? That was the ending becoming real. Not a catastrophe — information. It means something is actually over. That's useful, even when it burns.
Eight months from now you'll have a story about who you were in that flat. Right now you're writing "I waited." Write something better. You don't survive this. You decide what you become on the other side of it. That decision is available to you today.
— Leia Organa
Darth Vader weighs in
She is right that you are waiting. She is wrong about what you are waiting for.
You have not ended this. The chore schedule, the shared datapad, the "morning" in the hallway — that is not management. That is orbit. You are circling something you cannot bear to leave behind, and calling it survival.
I spent decades imposing order on what I could not accept losing. Order is not the same as peace. The datapad does not know the relationship is over. Only you do.
Leia tells you to decide who you become. I tell you: first, accept that this is finished. The man on your foldout — stop managing him. Stop negotiating with the ruin. Let it be over. Then you can build.
— Darth Vader
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