▸ Column · Star Wars galaxy, Imperial era — a four-year relationship facing a posting across hyperspace, with Vader answering from inside the armor.
DARTH VADER replies.
Replied to by Darth Vader, with a rebuttal from Luke Skywalker.
The letter
My partner of four years, Davin, accepted a two-year research posting at an Institute halfway across the galaxy — and told me the night before the acceptance had to be transmitted, over cold ration packs, as an announcement and not a question. We'd been planning to share quarters this season. I'd already toured two units and put a deposit down on one. He says he "didn't want to stress me" during the application — but he submitted months ago, and he's spent that whole stretch watching me pick out fixtures for rooms we were supposed to live in together. I love him. I don't think he's cruel; he just goes silent rather than sit through a hard conversation. Still, I can't shake the feeling that four years of "us" wasn't even a factor in the biggest decision of his adult life. Do I try to hold this together across the whole galaxy — or did the way he handled it already answer me?
Darth Vader replies
You ask whether to hold this together across the stars. I know that holding. I once feared losing someone so completely that I closed my fist around her and tightened it with every new fear, and I called the tightening love. It was not. It was the grip that crushed the very thing it meant to keep. Padmé. I will not say more than the name.
Now hear the part you already know and do not wish to. He made the largest choice of his life, and you were not in the room where it was made. His silence is not an accident of his nature — it is the answer, spoken in the only language a man uses when he has already decided. You felt it. That is why you wrote to a stranger in armor instead of to him.
Do not spend two years white-knuckling a thing across the void and mistaking the ache in your hand for devotion. I held that way. The harder I held, the faster it left me. Loosen the grip. See what remains when your fist is not the only thing keeping it whole. If nothing remains, then nothing was there — and better the ash now than later. It is too late for me. It is not too late for you.
— Darth Vader
Luke Skywalker weighs in
My father went silent on everyone who loved him for twenty years, and they all told me the silence was the whole answer. They were wrong, and I nearly believed them. So don't let Davin hand you "the way he handled it" as proof he's finished — flinching from a hard conversation isn't the same as not loving you. I've felt the pull to call something over before it actually was. Don't.
But my father's right that gripping kills it. Just don't confuse loosening your hand with writing him off. Make him have the talk he dodged — face to face, no announcement. Then decide. The door stays open until he closes it, not until you assume he did.
— Luke Skywalker
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