▸ Column · Star Wars galaxy, Rebellion era
LEIA ORGANA replies.
Replied to by Leia Organa, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
My wife Sela and I brought our son Dax home four months ago and I honestly can't remember the last time we were in a room without him. He sleeps in a bassinet wedged between our pillows, Sela nurses him on a two-hour rotation all through the night, and when my mother Rhea offered to watch him one evening so we could get dinner out — Sela spent the whole meal with the holo-monitor open in her lap, refreshing it. (My mother raised four kids in the Outer Rim. She knows what she's doing.) I'm not even asking for anything big at this point. I'd settle for finishing one conversation that didn't involve feeding logs or sleep windows. Last night I finally reached over to hold Sela's hand and she'd already fallen asleep sitting straight up against the headboard. I just don't know how two people find their way back to being a couple when there isn't a single moment in the day that belongs to just them.
— Sleepless on Coruscant
Leia Organa replies
The last time you reached for her hand, she was already asleep. And you're writing to me asking how two people find their way back to each other, as though the path is something you discover instead of something you lay down yourself.
I'll save you some time: the moment doesn't arrive. You build it. You carve it out of the schedule the same way you carve out any mission-critical window — you name the thing, you protect it, you don't negotiate it away because something else seems more urgent. Two hours on a given evening, Dax in your arms, her holo-monitor off and out of reach. Not because the child won't survive without her watching — he will — but because Sela needs to relearn that she can trust you to hold the post while she rests. So hold it. Give her the evidence before you ask for anything back.
That framing is wrong, by the way. You're treating this as Dax versus you and Sela, as though the baby ate your marriage. The marriage is what he is standing on. I know something about being told that the people you love are a luxury the mission can't afford. That's a lie. The people are the mission.
Your son will learn what love looks like from watching the two of you. That's not separate from raising him — that is the lesson.
Stop waiting for the square inch. Make one. Tonight.
— Leia Organa
Darth Vader weighs in
Organa speaks of claiming an evening as though the obstacle were the schedule. She is not wrong about the calendar — she is wrong about the wound.
The woman at that dinner table was not watching over Dax. She was drowning in the fear that something would take him. I know this fear. I fed it until it consumed everything, including the one I fed it to protect.
What you are watching is not exhaustion. It is a hand closing. A hand that closes tight enough, even around something it loves, eventually smothers it.
She does not need a cleared schedule. She needs the fear underneath named, not worked around. That is a different task entirely.
— Darth Vader
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