~I was a Padawan learner of Master Qui-gon Jinn in the years before he officially took the child Obi-wan Kenobi and, with less frequent visits, all through the time he trained (now Master) Kenobi, until Master Jinn's death at the hands of Darth Maul. On the distant fringes of what the Republic terms the Outer Rim, there is a quiet solar system of eleven planets orbiting a yellow star; one of the systems planets is distant enough from its ninth to be barely in the system and one is a rogue planet on a three thousand stellar year orbit. I was living on the third planet from the sun and knew nothing of the far reaches of the galaxy or of the Force...or so I believed.
~Hardly a child at our first meeting, I was twenty years of age and consigned to an institute where my society placed--for safekeeping and avoidance--those persons deemed 'extremely odd' by their fellows. I could make peculiar little things happen and knew things I either shouldn't (from those who liked their secrets) or couldn't (from those bound by a limited logic). On a particularly balmy summer's night, I was sitting cross-legged on my cot, with my back propped against the wall, staring out at the half moon and few visible stars with my usual sense of unknown longing...when the steel mesh in the open window flew silently off its frame and the dark shape of a man leapt through it. He did not frighten me; nothing much did as I assumed that most entities were figments of my imagination/illness as I'd so often been told. He seemed to be scanning the room. Without thought, reason or hesitation, I told him in a firm whisper:

"It's her..." indicating with my chin the sleeping woman in the cot across from mine.
~Also without hesitation, the 'woman' was suddenly off her cot and not a woman at all, but something huge and bulbous in the moonlit room. Tendrils shot out toward the man, who seemed immediately to be reaching for something amongst his billowing clothing. Just as the tendrils were coiling around the man's chest and arms, pinning him, I sent the large water pitcher crashing into the creature's--well, self, as there appeared to be no head really. That momentary stun allowed the man to free himself and a beam of glowing, humming green light sprang from his hand. In the blink of an eye and with soft hissing sounds, my late roommate, the now squidish thing, lay in many lumps on the floor.
"You should know", I matter-of-factly informed the man, "that Housekeeping is going to be very cross with you." Perhaps it was also the drugs that gave me such a sage like demeanor.
~Softly the man walked to the side of my cot and bent for a closer look, a tiny light appearing in his palm. What he saw was a smallish young woman with dark, cropped hair that was mostly cowlicks, strongly green hazel eyes and a subtle, wry hi-I'm-crazy smile that usually lifted just the corners of my mouth. What I saw was a tall man who 'felt' to me unbothered by anything with a long, slightly bent nose as if it had been broken, mild blue eyes and a look of observant contemplation that I was to learn was his nearly perpetual visage. A trim beard and mustache graced his pale face and long hair was half loose and half bound at the back of his head, all a graying dirty blond. For a moment, we held each other's eyes. Then he said lightly:
"I like your calm."
To which I replied, "*I* like your green light."
~Glancing briefly over his shoulder, he went on: "Don't worry, it'll melt away in moments...but there may be some awkward question for you in the morning."
~I almost laughed. "What do I know--I'm crazy!"
~Now he flicked off the little light and squatted, a more friendly, trusting posture. "By the way, my friend, how did you know?"
~I intuited, instantly, exactly what he was referring to but gave my standars answer. "I don't know..." Yet still he waited, as though I hadn't spoken, as though he really wanted my answer...my truth. "Fine then; when I saw you jump into the room--and we're on the fourth floor I might point out--I 'saw' a feeling in my body that connected the two of you. I felt that...thing, trying to erase the line between you two, with its mind or something. And 'she' always did feel creepy to me, always asking for my pudding..."
~Then he fingered the straps to my straight jacket. "And the water jug?" he asked even more quietly and I could sense the great extent of his openness right now, a full sensory expansiveness that seemed to be radiating outward; and then something...an echo returning...or an answer.
~I shrugged in my tight jacket, "I thought you needed help and then it just happened."
"Can you free yourself from this odd shirt?"
"I used to be able to, until they gave me drugs to muddle my mind."
~A deeply contemplative silence fell on the room. One of my other roommates grunted and rolled over.
"You should go," I warned him, "before one of the others wakes up."
"Don't worry," he confided, "I placed the rest of you in a sleep state before entering the room. *You* were not supposed to see what happened..."
"But I did."
"Exactly." Another pause, a powerful sense of lines converging on this instant in Time and Space. Then: "What are you doing for the remainder of your life?"

to be continued...