When someone leaves, the problem stops being absorbed
A departure, and what it makes visible.
When someone leaves, the problem does not arrive.
It stops being absorbed.
What they were holding rarely looked like load.
It looked like ordinary work: the decision that got made, the gap that was covered before anyone noticed it was there, the handoff that only held because someone walked it across by hand.
What mattered was not that they did it. It was that too much of it had nowhere else to sit.
Nothing showed up as strain. It looked like things working.
Then they go.
The strain was always there.
It had been carried by one person.
That was why no one saw it.