Sometimes when you’re somewhere new all you can think about is what you’ve left behind . . .

Rey sat on an outcropping of the island Ahch-To, her legs stretched before her, the sounds of the waves rising below. The ocean was dizzying. The colors—the blue, the green, the grey—all those shades that swirled across the depths entranced her. But its strange beauty couldn’t keep her thoughts from Finn. How was he? Would he recover from their frightening shared ordeal? Would she? Was she so different from that abandoned scavenger on the desert plains of Jakku? Had snow, green trees, and the entrance of unlikely friends seared her once-lonely existence forever? Finn was like her in a way . . . trying to find his path among the possibilities of a whole new world. Would he ever get the opportunity to see this sight? To walk and fight again?

Breathing out a deep, full breath, Rey pondered the words of Luke Skywalker. The stoic, mysterious, older man had suggested that a clear mind was the only true way to see the future, but how was she to clear the slate, make it clean again? Had it ever really been clear? No, it had never been easy to read the future in her case, because of her unique circumstances. She had been forced to live her whole life as though balanced upon the edge of a knife, angry, determined to beat the formidable odds. And now it seemed that the real battle was within, finding clarity from her emotions.

Rey rose to her feet, feeling the tiny rocks shift beneath the soles of her sturdy boots. The gravelly path seemed so solid, so stabilizing that she imagined how the Force might feel if solid in that way, not so intangible and tempting like a constellation upon the edges of her mind. It hummed, always promising more, ever on the boundaries of her conscious awareness, drawing her to Luke Skywalker far across the galaxy. Yes, to one hermetic individual who after a tragedy had forsworn training a new generation of Jedi. So where did that leave her? Was she destined to be a Jedi and learn the ways of the Force, or to remain in a haunted state of limbo, kept at arm’s length?

Her hands yearned for Luke’s old light-saber, an old habit reinforced in her travels to Ach-to, a way to feel close to Finn and the compelling possibilities of her new power. Sometimes she had pressed along its edges as if seeking to ignite it, but she had always stopped herself, still reeling from her improbable victory, if it could be called that, in those snowy, cataclysmic forests against . . . that man.

Luke had the light-saber now, and she was waiting for him to emerge from his disgruntled hiding and the act of “clearing his mind”, if that was something that could happen in this century. Her patience was wearing thin, she hated to confess, but her whole life was full and stunning and unexpected under this incandescent sun, so Rey tried to just . . . breathe. For Finn, for General Leia Organa, for Han Solo, for the living and the dead. She was alive and she wouldn’t give in to the depths of loneliness, she wouldn’t.

“I’m alive!” she found herself shouting to the breeze, the wind pulling her voice out like the strands of her hair. “I’m alive!” Tears streamed down her face, and before she knew it she was kneeling, holding her chest, feeling her heartbreak with all the power of a force-user. What was she even doing here, somewhere so astoundingly, exotically beautiful and dream-like? Who was she? She opened her eyes like one who had been blind, and her spine tingled.
“You are indeed alive . . . praise be to the stars for that reality, young Rey.”

She jumped, whirled around at the old Jedi’s voice, surprised at the kindness in the gruff man’s face. “I am,” she said simply, solidly to Luke, hiding her tears with a painful swallow.

“Have you ever seen so much water?” he asked quietly, glancing past her to the endless blue horizon.

“No,” Rey whispered, shaking her head.

“Water can destroy or sustain you, your choice, your reason.” Luke looked through her as if seeing someone else.

“What will you choose?” Rey found herself asking.

“You. Who have come across the stars for a reason.”

“Yes,” she breathed.

“Do you want to save your new friends, heal this galaxy?”

“I do.”

Luke came unobtrusively, slowly to her side and carefully touching her wet cheekbone, looked long at the remnants of tears in her deep moat-like eyes. “Somehow, I believe you. I see the light and shadow within you, seeking unity; you’ve awakened the Force.”