To my friends, "Asher" and "Liz". You went through what few can imagine, were living in a veritable hell, but you survived. And you soared.
From the diary of Obi-Wan Kenobi:
If there's one word—if there's one label, one synopsis, one whatever—that I would use to describe my life, it wouldn't be anything cheery. Anything safe, sunny. Average. No, you're looking at the one man who's soared so far below the radar, deviated so much from the norm that you could say I'm just extraordinarily unlucky.
My life in one word…it'd have to be "doomed." Doomed to fail, confounded by the force itself. Doomed to lose, to have everything I love, everything I hold dear, slip through my grasping fingers.
And doomed to pain, the unending kind that follows you to eternity's shore.
Funny thing about pain, though: to feel it, you have to something in you that's alive. That's still breathing, still fighting long after you've quit. You have to have a heart, a soul, something that can wrap its fingers around your object of affection and never let it go, and it has to have some goodness left in it. How much goodness, it doesn't matter; if there's only a tiny part of you that's resisted the dark, has stood as lone candle against its consuming barrage, then that's enough to warrant you for pain.
Admittedly, I haven't been the brightest soul this galaxy has ever seen. I've slipped up, have had those pitfalls that took me years to climb out of. Thing is, I've kept fighting. I've pushed forward, repulsing the dark with everything I had, and I keep my mind fixed on new worlds. The ones where tears have forgotten who they are, or why they were ever created in the first place.
Interestingly enough, it's the memory of regrets that keep me going. The echoes of Qui-Gon, slain by a monster I should've stopped, and the whispers of Anakin-who became the monster I can ever stop- keep my flame alive. Remind me every day that the future has always been greater than the past, overshadowing it like an eclipse.
But it's the after-imaged of Satine, seared into my mind's eye like a brand, that lends me the most strength.
She had her own strength in a way, too. An inner one. She was fiery, yes—but she wasn't so in your face that you wanted to slap her. Her softness, her quiet, stalwart determination…it made me want to kiss her till the end of time, drink deeply of her velvet lips.
Don't get the wrong idea: I'm not sex-nuts. I've never made love, haven't even come close to it, because it's not really love at all. It's a mere expression of it, a display of the intimacy that mere words could never describe. More than that, it almost embodies perfectly the word "marriage", shows us that two opposites can not only work as one, but can create something new. New and eternal and brimming with hope.
I am, however, somewhat of a romantic. I'm in love with love, really. Or with being in love.
And I tend to have a spot for beauty, too. Art, poetry, music—they're all ways to convey allurement, and I happen to have a soft spot for them all. Not that I'm talented at all of them, mind you; as Anakin once pointed out, my voice reminds him of a deaf rancor's dying wail. But Satine used to tell me that I a hand for poetry, so I've made a few attempt at it, if only to see her reaction to my monumental failure.
If you promise not to laugh or make some goodness-awful parody of it, here's one she seemed to enjoy:
Guide her, Way,
From the broad road.
Give her eyes to see more than just the grey,
That your death will kill her load.
Wash her, Truth.
Bathe her in the crimson flow.
She is yours, the one and only you choose,
The delicate, ivory doe.
Awaken her, Life,
Call her forth from the grave.
She comes to you spotless, white,
The one you came to save.
Hold her, White Knight,
Clutch her tight against your breast.
Call her out of dark, into light,
Wrenching the east from the west.
Alright, alright: you can laugh it up. I mean, I really couldn't find anything that rhymed with "truth"—anything that made any sense, anyway. Booth, tooth, uncouth…well, you see where that would've went.
But for some reason, Satine really took a liking to it. It could've been that she was humoring me, was playing the mother who gushes praise on a child who's splattered paint on a canvas and calls it a "drawing"-or maybe she just thought it was funny. Thought it was silly, childish, and all-too saccharine. All I know is that every night we had the chance to be alone she'd ask me to read that poem, her head resting under my chin as I let the words flow, twilight casting a starry glow on her silken hair.
It was on nights like that I was lucid, seeing clearly into the vast ocean of love. I understood that love wasn't something you could force on someone, wasn't a thing you will others into. I knew that it wasn't just a state of being, but of choosing deliberately to act in the best interest of another sentient, and that if you fell out of it, you hadn't really grasped it in the first place.
And I realized, in those nights spent under the eyes of the moon and stars, that love wasn't a war. It wasn't even a battlefield, not really. Instead, it became clear that it was THE war, the struggle that had gone on since the dawn of time to woo and be wooed. The war that determines where we stand in this life, where we'll ultimately draw our battle-lines. Where we'll run to when all else seems to have forgotten us.
Except it's not a war we fight with our hands. We don't wage it with our minds, don't ravish the enemy with the blinding strength of our souls. It's internal, inward, intimate, and it's screams our identity. Our true face.
The battlefield blares in our hearts.
It's a hard thing, keeping your affections aligned. I mean, they're all vying for a piece of you, trying to consume you—all of you—before you know what's happened. On one side you have duty, all righteous little causes that you fight so hard for; and on the other you have everything else. Love, friendship, loyalty—they all want you, are grabbing at you like the tentacles of some horrifying monster. Like some beast that wants to drag down to the abyss, hold you under till you hearts given up on life.
Maybe that's why the Order's banned attachment. When you have one, everything seems fine: the sky is clearer, your friends are closer, and the sun is brighter. You're living in a fantasy realm, a bubble where you'll live forever, love undyingly. But then reality comes along, pops your little idyllic world…and you're left gasping for air.
I've always known, always had this sense that I would have to lose a lot of things in my life. Like I was doomed to it, you could say. As if nothing I did, nothing I was or wanted to be could change the outcome, not even for a moment. And guess what? It happened. I lost everything, had it torn from my dead heart, and was left to ache for the rest of my sorry existence.
Even though my head's telling me that I have to let go of the past, move on and forget what I've done, I can't help but watch the faces of the lost ones wafting through my mind's eye. There's Padme, who died because I couldn't convince her otherwise; there's Ahsoka, who I just let walk away from everything she knew, everyone she loved. There's Qui-Gon, who's murderer is still at large in the galaxy because I don't aim at necks; and there's Anakin, who quietly became someone else when I wasn't looking. Or when I was done caring.
Most nights, I hear these ghosts, too. I listen to their songs, soaring through my mind as if they were actual altos. Then I weep. Bitterly.
Only…tears have to stop, right? They have to dry up, evaporate like the rivers they are. They have to depart, leaving us to face not only our questions, but the inevitable answers.
When the tears cease, I ask myself if I've totally screwed up. If I'm beyond hope, beyond saving. If I'm forever lost. Condemned.
When the questions fade, I answer myself with what I know. What I know about myself, about my past, that it's over and done with and that I'm a far different man than I when I first stumbled. Then I throw off the chains of regrets and failures, fixate my gaze on some far, distant place, and run toward it.
When my strength fades, I make myself go on. Force myself forward. Drag in painful, grating breaths.
And when I finally collapse, I'm staring up at the sun.
Philippians 3:12-14: Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press onward toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.