When I was a child I used to dream that one day my father would come to rescue me and explain that it had been a horrible mistake I was living with my aunt and uncle, and he wasn't dead, and then he would take me away on his starship.
My aunt and uncle were never bad people, far from it in fact, but my uncle's expectations that I would follow in his footsteps and become a farmer never attracted me. Perhaps it was the nothingness of Tatooine that made me want to escape and gave fuel to my ambitions, perhaps it was partly because of the adventurous streak in me. My aunt realised that I would never follow my uncle, but he still tried to grasp onto the vain hope that I would not become like my father and go on some doomed crusade.
When I was about nine years old me and my friend went into the desert, only to be found in the midst of a sand storm. Finding a cave we hid there until the storm had passed and it was safe to go home again. Of course my aunt and uncle were worried sick about me, thinking that I had died. Somehow I knew that even in the darkest and bleakest moments of the storm I knew that this wasn't my time to die yet. I had something greater to do.
Yet as the years came and passed my father never came to rescue me. If I ever asked my uncle about it he would just say that he had only met him once and even then it had been a short visit. Not a long enough time to get to know someone, not long enough to tell a good story about him. Yet still I dreamed, perhaps this absence of description about him made my imagination wander even more; no limits had been set.
Whenever I have enough money for a ruby bliel I wonder whether my father has ever had one. Something tells me that he has. Uncle Owen says that they are not good for my teeth and that I should brush my teeth extra specially hard when I have had one. I think my father would say the same but like them nonetheless. I think people like them because they offer an escape from the gritty reality of the desert.
Once I went to Mos Espa and people seemed to recognise me. An old woman who was making japor snippets and had called me Anakin. She asked me if I knew him and where he was, I replied yes he was my father and no I did not know where he is and that I think he had died before I was born. She looked saddened by that and her already shaky hands started to shake even more.
A story teller in the same place said that I reminded her of someone. She said that when she was younger a blonde haired boy and his dark haired friend used to visit her and listen to her stories. When I asked her for a story she told me of a slave boy who had won the pod race with a pod he had built on his own with bits from a scrap heap. She said that he had been freed by a Jedi and she said that the boy had never returned. When I ask her how a boy could be in a pod race she looked at me quizzically and then explained that this boy was special and unlike anyone who ever has been and unlike anyone who ever will be. I understood her then.
I have become renowned for being able to pilot almost anything. My uncle always says that I should not get my head to far in the clouds as otherwise I will lose sense of reality. I do not think I will though, I like to imagine in one way or another my father had a firm grip upon reality. People say that I remind them of a boy who could pilot anything. Like the boy who who won the pod race and they would smile and nod and say like the boy who won the pod race. I wish that boy would show me how to fly a pod racer, though I think I am too tall for that now. When I ask what the boy was called, they say they cannot remember his name but they can say they can remember he was a slave and that they loved him. I like to think that the storyteller and the other people are talking of the same person. The desert wind whispers to me that they are.
People say that I sometimes have a far away look in my eyes and that I day dream too much. I think they're right, sometimes dreams come to me of a girl with dark brown hair and dark brown eyes laughing in a field. I like her. The dream seems slightly sad though because however fast I run towards her she always disappears into the air around her. My friend Biggs laughs at me when I dream like this, he says that I live in my own little world. I think I do sometimes. I wonder if my father was ever like this, something he tells me he was.
When I had my first kiss I wonder when he had his and with whom. I wish he was there so that I might be able to tell him or that he could tell me how to get a girl to like you. I bet he was good at that. Mine was with a red headed girl named Iona. Something tells me the girl he loved was the one in my dreams, I do not think he had his first kiss with her though.
When I finally met my father it was when the dream died, he was not the the hero I had dreamt of or the name I had whispered to myself in the darkest hours of the night. Instead he was something which I had desperately tried to fight and had my arm cut off because of it and my lightsaber, or rather his old lightsaber plummet into the depths of that world. It was like he had then totally severed himself from Anakin; I would come to know better.
For months I couldn't come to believe believe that my earliest dream had materialised into some kind of nightmare. I refused to believe it and in the darkest hours of the night the whispering of the name Anakin Skywalker no longer brought any solace. Instead I would wake shuddering and screaming. I do not think that is what dreams look like. I always imagined them as something better, something nobler.
Yet somehow I never stopped dreaming completely, the boy within me has always wanted his father to come home and rescue him. They say that he is dead though.