▸ Column · Star Wars Outer Rim — long-distance comm-relay romance across star systems, dictated from a smuggler's perspective with a debt to Jabba hanging over him
HAN SOLO replies.
Replied to by Han Solo, with a rebuttal from Jabba the Hutt.
The letter
Mara and I have run two years of comm-relay romance across half the galaxy — she's planetside on Devaron nursing her dying mother, I'm hauling freight out of a port on the other end of the Rim. Every time I ask when we finally dock in the same system, the answer keeps shrinking: "next season," then "once things settle," then just a sigh. Her mom isn't getting better, so I know there's no clean finish line, and I get that. But I've built my whole life around a reunion that might never land. Last cycle I turned down a better posting two jumps out because I couldn't stand being one more hyperspace lane away — and the second I waved it off I felt sick, like I'd traded something real for something I made up. I still light up at her voice every night on the relay. But I'm thirty-four, and I want a shared galley, a mutt underfoot, a slow Sunday — not a screen. How do I tell patience apart from being a fool when there's no date to even wait for?
Han Solo replies
Alright. First thing — I'm not gonna sit here and tell you she's running a con. She's not. Watch what people do when leaving's the easy play, that's my whole test, and what she's doing is the rare, hard, decent thing: she stayed for her mother. That's not a smooth line. That's the realest thing in your letter. So don't let anybody talk you into thinking she stopped loving you. She didn't.
But here's where you're the one I'd worry about. You froze yourself, kid. Trust me, I know how that goes — I lost a chunk of my life on a wall in this guy's palace, frozen solid, and you don't get those years handed back. You declined that posting and called it devotion. It wasn't. It was fear in a nice coat. You can't get one jump closer to somebody you can't reach anyway.
So quit half-living and waiting for a date nobody can name. Go to Devaron. Be in the room. The long shot worth taking is showing up where she actually is — not pining at a relay across the galaxy. The Sunday you want? You build it. You don't wait for it.
— Han Solo
Jabba the Hutt weighs in
Hoo hoo hoo. Solo tells you to fly toward the trouble. Of course he does — look where that instinct landed him. Frozen on my wall, owing me still.
You, my friend, have a ledger problem. You keep paying — the posting you waved off, every devoted night on the relay — and what comes back? Shrinking promises. You have made yourself need her more than she needs you. That is a debt that flows one direction.
Do not chase to Devaron. Urgency is the discount you hand the other party. Stop spending. Let the absence sit on her side of the scale. The one who is owed waits at the center of the web — and they come to him.
— Jabba the Hutt
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