I just found this essay I wrote for a BirthMoviesDeath Star Wars special magazine some five years ago. I wish I'd found it a week ago, when Empire celebrated its 40th. But here it is. It never made it online, so here you go: "What does Han mean when he says, 'I know.'"

It’s the moment that every nerd with a beating heart and a scoundrel’s soul turns to for inspiration. The moment that somehow manages to be both incredibly romantic and totally bad-ass at the same time.

“I love you.”
“I know.”

You might think that brief exchange, between Princess Leia Organa and Han Solo towards the end of The Empire Strikes Back — just before he gets frozen in carbonite while she looks on with horror — cements the smuggler’s position as the galaxy’s original gangster of love.

It is the single coolest thing anyone’s ever said in a science fiction movie.

Except that Solo’s duo-syllabic response isn’t actually the declaration of pimpitude it’s been received as all these years. It goes far deeper and is, at its heart, far squishier. It’s an apology.

Walk with me for a bit.

Before he hooked up with an old wizard and an orphaned farmboy, Han Solo lived his life a quarter-parsec at a time, streaking through the galaxy in a junker hotrod with his hyper-intelligent man-dog-best-friend hanging out the passenger-side window.

Breaking laws, breaking vows, breaking hearts as only Han Solo can — and smirking the whole damned time. Responsibility was not a thing that factored into Solo’s life. What he didn’t steal, he won.

All he wanted to do was keep the Millennium Falcon in the air and have enough left over for a closet full of sweet-ass vests.

Even if you discount his adventures in the Star Wars Extended Universe — which Lucasfilm is, so let’s follow suit — his life was pretty much all about living in the moment, with no worries about whatever carnage was left in his wake.

Usually, that carnage was physical in nature, but occasionally it was emotional, too. Then he made the mistake of caring. First about the aforementioned farmboy, then about the farmboy’s long-lost sister.

He started to behave in ways out of character for him — saving people from certain doom, ignoring bounties on his head but staying put long enough for those to haunt him.

He formed attachments to people and rebellions, when the life of a smuggler needs to lived according to a code: Never take anything with you that won’t fit in a cargo hold and isn’t going to be dropped off at the next port.

He knew he was bad for Leia. He knew it from the start.

Luke: So, whaddya think of her, Han?
Han: I’m tryin’ not to, kid.
Luke: Good.
Han: Still, she’s got a lot of spirit. I don’t know…whaddya think? A princess and a guy like me…

Even if Luke hadn’t cut him off, Han understood how that sentence should’ve ended. And with good reason. She was a believer—in the Rebellion, in the Jedi, in hope itself—and he only wanted a good blaster at his hip. They should not be together, which is why of course they were.

But Han had to know that if he stopped running, if he dared to set down roots, the past he’d been blazing away from would catch up with him.

He might not be the greatest strategist — see the “my plan pretty much consists of tapping this stormtrooper on the shoulder and running” brilliance in Return of the Jedi — but he’s not an idiot.

(He is, however, incredibly lucky: The entire success of the Endor campaign rides on him accidentally stepping on a twig, which leads to the involvement of the Ewoks, without whom the Rebel alliance would’ve played directly into the Emperor’s hands. Solo is lucky until he isn’t.)

He knew that a relationship with Leia would end badly. Perhaps disastrously. But he did it anyway. We have all wanted something we couldn’t have, right? The difference is, for Han Solo, his solution is just to take it anyway.

(And this is in no way letting Leia off the hook, or rendering her a prize to be won. But her relationship math is far different from his.)

(She has to factor in how a relationship with a scalawag will affect her role in running the Rebel Alliance and whether the distractions he prompts are worth her lack of focus on, you know, stomping out planet-scuttling evil.)

(Leia has as much agency in Empire as Han does, but brings far less baggage to the table.)

By the time Han and Leia land at Lando’s — another instance where Han’s past rears up and takes a dump on the present — Han knows he’s in deep, both in love and with trouble. He knows something stinks about Cloud City, but he’s out of options.

He knows he shouldn’t drag Leia into the world he’d been trying to leave behind, but he’s out of options. He knows she’s better off without him, but he doesn’t want to let her go.

So when Darth Vader and Boba Fett crash a dinner party and then proceed to torture Han on the sharp end of an engine block while Lando’s deal keeps getting worse all the time, it all manifests as proof positive that Leia made a bad call with Han. And Han knows it. He always did.

“I love you.”

“I know. I wish you didn’t, because then you’d never be here with me, captured by something called a Sith Lord, with that other guy you’re uncomfortably close with being trained by a puppet planets away."

"You’d be safe — or as safe as the princess of an Alliance of Rebels can ever be — and free to live the kind of life you want. You could maybe even be happy."

"And I can see now that’s all I ever wanted for you. To be happy. Foolishly, I thought I could be the one to make you happy. So I dragged you down into my world with me. And for that, I am truly, eternally sorry. Hey, do you feel that really cold breeze?”