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“You will never be as strong as Darth Vader.”
The scavenger girl hurls the words at you, stinging and lashing like lightsaber cuts. She heard them ringing in your head; heard the drums that bang your fears against your skull, the fears that pound till it hurts. The fears that grip at your heart every night as you lie alone, lightyears away from the family you have forsaken. Away from the family that deceived you. From the family that lied to you. The family that kept the truth out of reach of your young hands until someone came along who brought it down for you when you needed it. They betrayed you first, before you betrayed them.
She’s not wrong. The words she found came from you, from your darkest fears. From the fears that would make you regret your decisions if you weren’t too far down a path that tore the boy you used to be away from the knight of ash and destruction that rose. You fear that your idol remains only that: a legend you will never live up to. A ghost of your past, an echo that resounds with every step you take. With every step you take away from the family that nurtured you in what they would call innocent comfort; those lies they told. The steps clatter against the floor of the Destroyers. Against the floors of the very things your family fought against when your mother and uncle were younger than you are now.
Darth Vader may be your family because of them but they are no family of yours, not anymore. They are ghosts of people you used to love, as insignificant as the rest but more emotionally daunting to think about.
Then there are the ghosts of the people you know of but never knew. Their names are your history, a part of your legacy but they mean nothing. They are the names of the dead. The names of the fallen who lived and died before you were even an idea. There are millions others like that them: insignificant names that won’t impact your future. You were the prize after nearly thirty years of unrest and war. You were the hardwon end game to honour those lost before you. You were family to lists of the dead. They are not family to you. They are nothing but ghosts: imprints of dust caught in the stars that manifest in your dreams.
They haunt you.
You try to say that those ghost don’t affect you. That their glowing forms are a by-product of your upbringing and nothing more. You try to say that they are insignificant, unimportant. You're wrong. No matter how you lie to yourself your heart speaks the truth no matter how you try to bury it beneath rage and destruction. They do matter. All of them that come. The ones that you can name and the faces of strangers that played a part somewhere along the lines. All of the ghosts, the women, the men, the children, the Jedi, your family, your ghosts: they haunt you. Each night as you lie alone alone cut off from what you have they come as a fresh reminder of what was lost.
They haunt you and you hate them for it.
There is a woman, aged and weary. She crouches next to you as if saying goodbye, She has a resolve in her gaze that doesn’t match her smile. She tells you she loves you and that she always will. There is a sadness to her you don’t understand. She reaches out to touch your face but disappears before contact and leaves you with a sick feeling deep in your stomach.
There is a man, impressive in stature. His words have a rolling power to them, a gravitas that draws you in. All he does is talk. Soft words that probably held meaning once but now do not. In his arms he holds a baby. He talks to her of policies and protection, of planets and princesses. He tells her he loves her and you can feel it punching you in the gut every time.
There is the tiny being that sits on the edge of the bed. He is cryptic and you want to do nothing more than yell at him. The ghost echo senses this, it would seem, as he always laughs at you. He is wizened and ancient: the product of both time and a deep grief. He outlived them all, you can sense it. Sometimes he’ll just look at you in concern as if he’s seeing someone else.
There is the Sith. He stands like a politician and is dressed like one. Sometimes he holds a red lightsaber. More often than not he is surrounded by bodies, laid out like fallen treasures at his feet. He walks over them or ignores them completely as they cry ‘Master, Master.’ The one with the red face and the dual sabre. The tall man with the cunning grin. The burning man that is barely a whole person. Then sometimes there are younglings at his feet, dead and stricken, tiny. You wake up in a cold sweat when you see them.
There are others too. The dark Jedi with the disapproving face who sits in silent contemplation. Or silent judgment. He frowns and mutters about a prophesied Chosen One but doesn’t speak to you.
There is the Jedi who is sometimes with your namesake. The man watches what happens along with you, knowing like you how it plays out. He is in pain when he watches it. He would cry but does not. A jedi would not and he is an echo of one.
There is the girl who looks about ready to smack you. She is sitting on the floor, defeated, she lifts her gaze and her face breaks out into a snarl when she sees you. She spits “You will never win” before she scatters into nothing.
Sometimes there is a man with her, as fierce and broken as she. He laughs at her snarl and reaches out to her as they disappear at the same time.
There are all of the pilots wandering about with helmets tucked under their arms. They run off, excited, mission ready and raring to go. They talk of the ‘exhaust port’ and the perfect shot. They fade away one by ne.
You see others: fleeting, barely there others that you never see again. A greasy pilot with long hair and a nervous look. A blind man with a staff and another with a gun right by his side. A captain protecting a queen. Numerous Jedi, brave and well trained, fighting in life and death.
The old man comes to you with a world weariness that hangs heavy on his shoulders. You are sure he is younger than he looks. There has been heavy loss in his life and this is what grief has made of him.
This is the man they named you after.
He always looks disappointed. Like he’s been out of it for so long and now he’s dragged back in all he’s seeing is the shell of one he trained and loved filled with something that he doesn’t want to comprehend.
He tells you to trust in the Force and to mind your teachings. He tells you to be careful with your emotions and to curb your anger. It always sounds like he has said those words before. He sound like he wants you to listen, to listen where someone in the past did not. He wants to beg you to listen where he was previously ignored but he remains stoic and calm.
You are the namesake of this man. He was one of the last Jedi masters. He protected your uncle from a distance in order to hide your mother. You heard that he was a real Force ghost. He would never appear in that form. He appears only as the Force shows him, not as he wills.
He would be ashamed of you. You are all he tried to stop. He always appears the same. The same lecture, the same warning. Then he is destroyed and as he crumbles the dust of your dreams disintegrates too.
There is the woman. She was one of the first to appear to you, crying and pregnant. She looked heartbroken and you woke with tears streaming down your face and an urge to rid yourself of the clawing feeling in your throat. She looked like your mother.
She appears a lot. She never says anything but sometimes you know how she feels regardless. She represents a whisper of a moment that came long ago.
She is young and nervous in a regal gown with a line of blood red paint cutting down the the lip on her pale white canvas of her face.
She is young and natural, a wooden pendant in her hand as a cheer escapes her silent lips.
She is crying out in pain as she is clawed by something invisible, a chain in her hand.
She looks worried and fearful, curls caught in the moonlight as she stares away from you.
She is radiant as she cradles a growing stomach.
She shoots with accuracy, concentration on her brow.
She lies motionless, curls spread around her as she is taken away. Her breasts are heavy with milk she will not give. Her babies are born, you know that, you know who she is , but she will not hold them in her arms again. A pendant is caught in her pale fingers. She is an angel: beautiful, unobtainable, dead.
Your grandmother, for no ghost is as tragically beautifully heartbroken as she, is a ghost of a moment. She appears only as she lived but only as less than a fragment. She is long gone. The young queen, the empowered senator, the loving wife. Whatever she was, whoever she was is gone with the memory of her
She never stays for long and she always comes alone. She is strong and broken. She is hurting and she hurts you. She never stays, never speaks but sometimes you wake to a cry that pierces through you. “Ani, you're breaking my heart.” Less than an echo from something that is itself less than an echo. Yet her echo is a pulsing scream that preys on your mind, feeds the fear and the rage.
Her ghost is the echo of your heart as your actions are an echo of his.
He is the ghost that stands over you. He appears most frequently and he appeared first. He was the first to taunt you and you know it is the Force punishing you, laughing at you, taunting you. Even in shadows you can see the emotion of his eyes. In pain, in love, in fear, in danger, in hope, in anger, in life, in death. His eyes are the changing features. The scar still marrs his eye. His hair is always outgrown the Padawan stage. His metal hand glints from beneath the folds of his cloak.
He is the ghost of his death even as his eyes tell the story of his life.
He appears not as the man you idolise and you still don’t realise that Anakin Skywalker’s life extends past Darth Vader’s.
You never see the slave boy except as an unexplained story behind the pain in the eyes of the ghost. You never see the boy who wanted to escape to better things.
All the ghost represents is an unexplained story, A story your parents refused to tell you. He represents what was lost and what you want to gain instead. He is more familiar and yet the meaning of his death is lost on you.
You worship the worst of your grandfather, the part he denounced for family.
The ghost knows this but like his wife he is silent. He does not pass judgment or scowl, does not praise you and does not say anything. He watches you. You know that the ghost knows of your plans and of your doings because if he haunts you like this at night then he knows.
This is not a Force ghost, none of them truly are. All they are is the preserved memories recreated by the Force and sent to you when you lie estranged on the path of darkness.
The scavenger girl said you will never be as strong as Darth Vader. Maybe those are her words, maybe they’re your own. Either way they stir within you memories that you shouldn’t have. Memories that weaken you and make you less than what you want to be. They make you weak so you can never be strong.
You don’t know anything. You don’t listen to the pain in their eyes as they watch their history repeated. As they watch it all burn.