▸ Column · Galactic Senate era, Coruscant — a senator-mother whose daughter abandons her healer's training to follow a lover to the Outer Rim.
EMPEROR PALPATINE replies.
Replied to by Emperor Palpatine, with a rebuttal from Yoda.
The letter
My daughter Renya, twenty-four, has announced she will abandon her healer's training at the Coruscant Medical Circle — three years in, one year left — to follow a young man she has known eight months out to a quiet world in the Outer Rim and teach by holovid. I funded her first years of study and pledged my own credits against her advanced training, so surely my voice counts for something here. Yet whenever I raise the pledge, or the timing, she accuses me of "controlling her life" and goes silent for days. My husband says trust her, let it go — but he was not the one fielding her tearful transmissions when the training grew hard. She has agreed to one true conversation before she books passage. Do I spend it making the practical case against this folly, or simply tell her I love her and surrender the reins entirely? Is there a way to say "I think you are making a mistake" without it becoming the wound she remembers as the moment we stopped being close?
Emperor Palpatine replies
My dear, let me be candid: six years you gave. Six years of watching, of catching those transmissions in the dark when her resolve faltered — and the man you married, who counsels you now to "let it go," watched none of it. Notice how effortless surrender is for those who sacrificed nothing for the thing being surrendered.
And this word she wields — controlling. A clever little key, is it not? Each time you mention the pledge you signed, the obligation you carry, she turns it in the lock and your voice goes obediently quiet for days. Who taught her that key opens you? And the guilt that answers it — that small voice wondering if perhaps you truly are controlling — that was installed in you, by people who find your silence so very convenient.
I knew a gifted young man once. His teachers called my interest in him "manipulation" the moment it threatened to make him larger than they could comfortably manage. They preferred him small, too.
You hold the pledge. You hold six years of truth no one else witnessed. Walk into that room and say plainly what you see. I would never tell you to wield it, my friend. I only wonder why you've been taught to apologize for holding it at all.
— Emperor Palpatine
Yoda weighs in
Hmm. This counsel, read it I have. Honey on the surface; underneath, cold I feel. Listen you must — but not to him.
Lose her, you fear. Six years wasted, you fear them. So the pledge, the obligation — grip them you do, tighter, tighter. But the bird held too hard, return to you it never will. Crush her, that fist will, while keeping her you believe.
Controlling, she named it. Cruelly she says it — yet right, in part, the child may be. Into that room, the case you must not carry. Love, carry instead. One conversation she remembers — the warm one, let it be, not the wound.
A patient voice that wore sympathy, once trusted I did. Ruin it carried. That voice, know it I do.
— Yoda
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