1. Spark of Rebellion

“We should watch Star Wars Rebels.”

“Hmm.” I don’t look up from my phone. I’m scrolling through Twitter, words and images rolling along without my registering them.

My then-fiancé, now-husband, has made some variation on this request several times in the past few months. It’s 2016, somewhere during the hiatus betweens seasons 2 and 3, and the Star Wars renaissance is building momentum after the enthusiastic response to The Force Awakens and the curiosity surrounding the yet-to-be-released Rogue One. It’s before the election that changes everything, before Carrie Fisher’s death, before my Leia tattoo, before we start our podcast, before, before–

And my greatest problem, in that moment, is that I don’t know how to tell him that I’m not quite ready to let go of The Clone Wars, which we’ve recently binged on Netflix, not ready to make room in my heart for the Ghost crew’s stories yet. I don’t know how to say it because it sounds stupid. What sounds even worse is that I still smart when I think about Ahsoka leaving the order, or Fives’s death, or Obi-Wan’s loss of Satine. Continue reading →