▸ Column · Star Wars galaxy, Outer Rim — a holozine advice column read on Raydonia
DARTH MAUL replies.
Replied to by Darth Maul, with a rebuttal from Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The letter
My bondmate Corso came home to our quarters on Raydonia last cycle, cracked open a flask of spiced wine, and announced he'd taken a freight-overseer posting in the Bryx system — most of a sector away from the rooms we've shared four years. Not "I'm considering," not "what would you think." He'd already signed with the guild, given notice on his current berth, and was thumbing through habitation listings on his datapad before he said one word to me. When I asked why he never mentioned even applying, he said he "didn't want to raise my hopes over nothing," and that he'd assumed I'd be glad, since I'm forever cursing our quartermaster. But my mother is two streets over, still mending from a bone-graft, and my entire healing practice — every patient who trusts me — is rooted in this city. I love him. But I feel less like his partner and more like a potted thing he's decided to dig up and replant somewhere else. How do I begin a conversation about a move he has already set in motion?
Darth Maul replies
A potted thing he decided to replant. You chose that word, not I. Sit with it, because it is the truest thing in your letter, and everyone soft enough to love you will rush to talk you out of it.
He did not forget to consult you. He decided you were not a party to the decision. That is the wound. Name it. He arranged your entire life around his ambition and assumed you would thank him for the lift.
I know something of being treated as refuse. My master made me a weapon and discarded me when I no longer served. I was cut down and thrown away in the dark. So I will not tell you to smile and pretend the dignity he took was nothing. It was not nothing.
But hear the rest, because I pay for it daily. Do not raise your voice. Do not make a campaign of this. Say little. Let him fill the silence explaining himself, and watch what he reveals. Then state the one thing plainly: your roots are not furniture. Your mother, your patients — those are weight, not whim.
And do not let this one wound become the whole shape of you. That mistake I am still living.
— Darth Maul
Obi-Wan Kenobi weighs in
Maul. Always the wound, always the discarding. Not every clumsy man is a master throwing away a weapon.
From a certain point of view, you're right — he treated her as settled scenery, and that wants saying. But look squarely: "I didn't want to raise your hopes" is not contempt. It is fear, dressed badly. I knew a frightened young man who hid his choices because he couldn't bear to be talked out of them, and my silence let it fester. Don't counsel her into a cold war of patient stares.
Two truths: her roots are real, and he is afraid, not cruel. Wait for the moment he can hear you — then say both.
— Obi-Wan Kenobi
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