▸ Column · Coruscant, Level 1313 cantina, several years after the Battle of Yavin
LUKE SKYWALKER replies.
Replied to by Luke Skywalker, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
Twenty standard years ago my father walked out during my sister Meri's naming celebration when she was eight, and I heard nothing from him afterward save a forwarded notice when my grandmother passed and a solstice greeting that arrived half a season late. Last rotation my comm lit up with an unregistered frequency — my father, calling from a Republic aid station where he now transports recovery patients to medical appointments in his own shuttle. He asked whether I'd be willing to share a meal. We spent three hours in a back booth on Level 1313. He offered no defense of himself, just listened while I told him what he had missed — my apprenticeship induction, my bonding ceremony — and then he wept into a cloth napkin and thanked me for answering the comm. I am forty-one standard years old and I had genuinely decided that door was sealed for good. I am writing partly because I cannot stop smiling and partly because I want a sober second opinion. How do I keep this fragile, somehow good thing from falling apart under everything we never said for two decades?
Luke Skywalker replies
I know that grin. I know it the way I know the exact second I stopped believing my father was gone — standing somewhere I should have been terrified, discovering I'd been wrong about "lost" the same way I'd been wrong about nearly everything else I thought I understood.
You're asking how to keep this from collapsing. That's the right instinct and it's also the question I'd be careful with. Because the moment the relief lands, a new fear arrives right behind it — that you'll do something wrong and the door will close again. I know that fear. It showed up for me too, and I nearly let it make me smaller than I wanted to be.
Here's what I learned: you don't have to lift all twenty years at once. The meal was the meal. The next conversation is just the next conversation. Trying to sort two decades into something organized and settled — who owes what, what needs accounting for, what each silence really meant — turns repair into an audit, and audits don't heal anyone.
You've already done the hard part. You answered the comm. You sat for three hours. You let him hear real things, and he didn't run from them. The door doesn't stay open through frantic maintenance — it stays open by walking back through it, one ordinary time after the next, until ordinary is what you've built together.
Trust the grin. Let this be slow. Slow is how it lasts.
— Luke Skywalker
Darth Vader weighs in
My son advises patience, and on this once I will not argue with him.
What he cannot tell you — because he was always the one reaching across, not the one being reached — is what it looks like from the other chair. Your father sat across a table from you, wept, and offered no explanation for himself. He is carrying something old and very heavy. That freight belongs to him. Do not begin arranging it so he can bear it more easily. Do not soften the edges of what he abandoned so the accounting goes down more comfortably for him. That is not mercy. That is absorbing his debt.
And your "how do I keep this from collapsing" — I recognize that impulse precisely. I once called it protection. Watch the grip.
— Darth Vader
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