At the age of ten, I left home to become a Jedi. 

I left in my Uncle's ship without even looking back, the only reminder of home being my little brother who held onto my hand tightly, much more nervous than I was. I didn't even spare a goodbye wave to my parents, the senator and the smuggler having to make do with a farewell from my brother only. 

We'd had our bags packed for weeks before our Uncle came to pick us up, though I'd had to encourage Ben since I had been far more excited for the whole thing. It was going to be an adventure, I'd told myself in childish naivety, but at the same time I knew the weight of it all. With us, we would be bringing back the Jedi order, the glorious days of peace that had ruled over the galaxy before the galactic civil war.Maybe if war stories and tales of the Jedi hadn't been my bedtime stories as a child I might have not been so excited. If I hadn't been raised under the stories of glory and heroes I wouldn't have wanted my own destiny to follow that path.

I loved my family. My mother, who taught me right from wrong and how to stand up for myself with honour. My father, the brave anti-hero who stopped at nothing to make me laugh. My Wookiee Uncle, fiercely protective in his promise to look after our family, even though there was no real threat in the galaxy now the empire had been defeated, only three years before I was born. I loved them, but I loved my Uncle too, the legendary last Jedi who'd promised to train Ben and I. We ran to him in excitement, and with that turned our back on the rest of our family. 

We left home, and for nearly the next ten years we trained with other force-sensitive individuals, all of a similar age to us from all over the galaxy. They weren't like Ben and I though. The two of us were a duo to be reckoned with, even among our classmates. We had Skywalker blood, and with that carried the strength of a Jedi legacy, a legacy that we didn't fully understand until our mother confessed to us the darkness within our family. Learning that Darth Vader was our grandfather had done different things to Ben and I, with me making more of an effort to remember and live my the light, whilst Ben withdrew into himself, feeling abandoned by our parents and the rest of the galaxy until he found refuge somewhere else.

Perhaps if we had not run so excitedly to the academy, if we had understood everything else around us like our family history and the importance of our training, I might not have ended up in a self-imposed exile on a sandy wasteland, hiding from the nightmares of my past, the galaxy in chaos and my little brother in darkness.

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