▸ Column · The Imperial era — a couple serving at the same garrison, writing to a HoloNet advice column
DARTH VADER replies.
Replied to by Darth Vader, with a rebuttal from Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The letter
My partner Davin and I are posted to the same Imperial garrison, and we truly love each other — but the moment we disagree about anything, it detonates. Last cycle I asked, perfectly calmly, why he hadn't logged the work order for the busted coolant line in our quarters. Twenty minutes later we were both hoarse and furious, and the officer in the next berth pounded the wall to ask if everything was all right. I can't recall a single time this past year that a small complaint stayed small; it always escalates until one of us is in tears and the other has stormed out to the corridor. The strange part is that ten minutes later we're fine — laughing, splitting a ration of noodles, like two people who didn't just say unforgivable things to each other. How do we learn to actually finish a disagreement instead of nuking it, before one of those terrible sentences sticks for good?
Darth Vader replies
You believe you are fighting about a coolant line. You are not. You are two people each terrified of losing the other, and you have each discovered that fury feels like strength. While you are the one shouting, you cannot be hurt. I know this lie intimately. The dark side did not free me from fear. It only gave the fear a throne — and once anger sat there, it was the only voice I had left.
Hear the part you dismiss as harmless: the ten minutes after, when you are fine again. That is the cruelest mechanism of all. It tells you the wound always heals, so you keep reopening it — until the day it does not. I once let my anger reach for the person I loved most. I will not describe what it cost. I will only tell you that the sentence that sticks does not announce itself. It arrives like all the others.
The strength is not in the next thing you say. It is in refusing to say it. When the fury rises and demands to win, that is the moment to set down the weapon. Loosen your grip. I held everything by force, and I am alone in this armor. Do not learn this the way I did.
— Darth Vader
Obi-Wan Kenobi weighs in
Listen to him about the anger. He of all beings paid the full invoice for it — I watched a young man I loved let fury answer every question until there was nothing of him left to answer at all.
But he gives you tragedy when you need timing. This is not a galaxy ending, you two. It is two exhausted people choosing the very worst moment — braced, raw, ninety seconds in — to hold a serious conversation. Well. Don't. Patience. The argument keeps. The fight you avoid tonight, you can actually win tomorrow, when you're rested and neither of you is reaching for the throat. The dramatic stand is nearly always the lazy one.
— Obi-Wan Kenobi
▸ Read next