Another Sunset

By : J. Helios

 

The vaporators are screwing up again. The dampeners on my speeder are going out and are begging to be replaced. My life is going nowhere fast. Hell, where else would it go? Especially if you’re stuck on a nowhere planet such as Tatooine.

 

Turning the hydrospanner in my hands, the circuit board in front of me blurs and fades as I shut my eyes. In my minds eye, I can see myself in the same place, forty-years older, with the same damn circuit board. I open my eyes and blow on the board a bit. As expected, a bit of sand flies out, stinging my eyes.

 

I hate the sand. It get everywhere and erodes what it touches. Machines, buildings, hands, people, hearts, dreams. The sand buries them all. The sand destroys them all. Not immediately, but as long as you’re in the sand, it’ll destroy everything that you are.

 

The older people who have stayed here for so long had long been buried in the acrid sands that it has been ingrained into their blood. The sand has become their lifeline; they would die if you take them out of this planet.

 

But what about us, the younger generation? Are we destined to be born, grow and be eroded by the sand, to bear children who will be eroded by the sand as well? It is just an endless, programmed loop that we can never break off from.

 

Then what about Biggs? He got away. He’s a pilot now, a dream that we both had. A dream he realized, a dream that’s beginning to slip from my fingers. He took everything he had and blasted off from this planet. Never to look back.

 

Hell, *I* wouldn’t look back.

 

Stepping up into the entry way, I watch the sunset, for perhaps the thousandth time in my 18 years. The Twin suns of Tatooine, Tatoo 1 and Tatoo 2, are the main cause of all the heat in this planet. But looking at them like this, one half disappearing into a pool of reddish light and another, looking like it wanted to join in the suicidal jump into nothingness, it’s hard to stare at them with anger. This is the only time one can directly look at them.

 

And they look beautiful.

 

Two stars, drawn to each other, reaching a state of equilibrium. A state of equilibrium which has created a centuries old dance between the two.

 

And I, on the single hospitable planet.

 

But I don’t want to be a solid planet, content to spin in my own axis, in my own place in the system. I want to be a star. I want to burn brightly, furiously, to be seen across parsecs and parsec of known and unknown space. I want to be a brilliantly burning star in the sea of stars.

 

With no sand.

 

I look back into the homestead. I better check on those droids, especially the Artoo unit. Maybe I could find out more about that hologram. Or maybe I won’t. Somehow I don’t really care now.

 

Someday, somewhere, I will be the brightest star in the galaxy. People will look up in the night sky and go ‘Wow. That’s Luke Skywlker’

 

That is what I want to do.

 

I want to walk across the sky.