▸ Column · Viltrumite Empire: an interstellar soldier returning from years on the outer campaigns to a family that no longer recognizes him
OMNI-MAN replies.
The letter
I completed three years on the outer campaigns and came home fourteen months ago. My daughter Verana was eight when I shipped out and is nearly a young woman now — she answers me in single words and pages her mother from the next room rather than speaking to me directly. My son Darin is the one who has done something to me I cannot name. He used to sleep against my side. Last week a hull-seal in the corridor blew with a crack like a plasma charge — reflex had me flat on the floor before thought could catch up. He ran to his mother and I heard him whisper that his father is "frightening now." I do not know how to explain to a child that age that the soldier who flinches at a door-slam is still the father who taught him to fly before he could properly run. Some days I am not certain that is true. My wife says time will close the gap. I have been home fourteen months. The gap is not closing. What does a soldier do when he cannot find his way back to the father his children knew, and is not yet certain who he is becoming?
Omni-Man replies
Fourteen months, and you are waiting for your family to recognize a man you are still learning yourself. Think. Your wife is not wrong that time matters — she is wrong that time alone does the work. Time only extends the gap unless something happens inside it.
Here is what has to happen: your son Darin saw you hit the floor. He does not need you to erase that. He needs words to hold it — not an apology, not a performance of whoever you were before you deployed, but the truth: the father who taught him to fly before he could walk now carries something heavy, and sometimes the weight moves before he does. He can hold that. Children hold more than we grant them.
I know something about becoming the thing your child fears. I stood over my son and made the wrong choice, and the distance that opened between us nearly hardened into something permanent before I understood that no stretch of waiting was going to close it unless I moved through it differently. Time is not the agent. You are.
You are not the same man who left. Stop trying to return to him. Your wife and your children do not need the impersonation of whoever you were before the campaigns. They need the man standing here now — changed, weighted, still their father. Let them see that one.
You will outlive this pain, or you will not. Either way, waiting decides nothing. Act through the weight. That is what strength actually looks like, and I say this as someone who spent five hundred years getting the word entirely wrong.
— Omni-Man
Thragg weighs in
"Act through the weight." Grayson means it. He is also a Viltrumite who let a single attachment corrupt a five-hundred-year career into treason, and he still holds that weight's permanence as fixed truth. It is not. Your reflexes are friction — the residue of threat-patterns imprinted before your present situation existed. Friction diminishes under systematic discipline. It does not require a philosophy of permanent suffering.
I will not counsel you to embrace a burden Grayson could not engineer out of himself as though that inability constitutes wisdom.
One thing I cannot account for: what your son's recognition costs if you do not recover it. There is a dimension to that I do not possess the instrument to measure. On that, you must seek counsel elsewhere. Grayson's ceiling and mine are both real; mine is simply more honest about itself.
— Thragg
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