▸ Column · Outer Rim refugee relief in the waning days of the Republic, Star Wars galaxy
OBI-WAN KENOBI replies.
Replied to by Obi-Wan Kenobi, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
I'm the only translator-healer at a small refugee relief outpost on the Outer Rim, and I've held that post four years. Last month a settled Core-world guild offered me a position that pays nearly double — enough to clear the debts my family carried since the war and breathe for the first time in my adult life. When I told our director I meant to leave in six weeks, she wept and said the forty-seven displaced families on my rolls would "slip through the cracks" without me. Now I lie awake in the dark hours wondering whether choosing a better life makes me genuinely wicked. The outpost has known for two years that I am the single point of failure for every Spanish-tongued family we serve, and has done nothing — no second hire, no record of how I do what I do. My head knows that is their failure of management, not my crisis. My heart hasn't caught up. Can a person leave a post like this without being the villain — or am I only fishing for permission?
Obi-Wan Kenobi replies
Well. Let me relieve you of one thing at once: no, you are not the villain. You have spent four years catching people the galaxy was content to let fall, and the day you tend to your own life as carefully as you've tended theirs, you will have done nothing wrong.
But your director's tears, genuine as they are, point you at the wrong guilt. Forty-seven families resting on a single person — that was built, knowingly, over two years, by people who are not you. I know something of being made the one load-bearing pillar of a thing too heavy for one back. I once carried a young man's whole future as though it were mine alone to carry, and told myself the strain was noble. It was not noble. It was others' failure, which I had mistaken for my duty — and the mistaking cost me everything.
Here I will not comfort you: leaving cleanly is work. Spend those six weeks setting down all that lives only in your head — every family named, the bridge you were never given, built. Not because their negligence is your emergency, but because tending faithfully on the way out is the whole difference between a person who left and one who fled. Then go. Pay your debts. Sleep.
— Obi-Wan Kenobi
Darth Vader weighs in
Kenobi counsels you to build their bridge for them. Of course he does. He always did mistake another's negligence for his own sacred burden — I was that burden once.
Hear a colder truth. Those tears are not grief. They are a hand closing around your wrist. For two years they let you be the only door those families had, because one irreplaceable servant is cheaper than two. Now they weep so the door cannot leave. I know the sound of someone made indispensable precisely so they cannot go.
Set down what you choose to. Owe them nothing past it. The villain in your letter sits weeping in the director's chair — not the one reading this in the dark at two in the morning. Go.
— Darth Vader
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