For the love of Anna

Chapter 2

Dear Diary,

Last night was dream 436. It is usually the same every night but this time there was another piece of the dream that was more visual.

Most nights the male in my dream stands with something in his hand but I never see what it is, only that it is pink in colour. Last night however I managed to look at him for slightly longer and I could clearly see the item he was holding was a little girl's dress.

Could it be Anna's?

Why would he be holding it?

It is frustrating to think that I have been having this dream for over a year now and I still can't make out his face. What does it all mean?

Xx Emy

I wished and prayed every night before bed that it would stop. Having the same dream over and over every night for a year now was exhausting. I often woke drenched in sweat just like I had been in the actual lake and I knew my parents were concerned about the screaming and exhaustion it left me with.

We had visited our local doctor and also seen a sleep specialist, but nothing had changed and they couldn't suggest anything to cure it.

Looking back through my diary it also occurred to me that the dreams were becoming more realistic over time and aspects of the dream that I couldn't see before were becoming clearer.

Everything inside me wanted to know who Anna was and why she kept turning into a porcelain doll when I rescued her. My ability to not keep her from disintegrating between my hands always made me feel like I had failed in some way so I had tried several time to change it slightly, to see more details if I could.

If I had a tragic event happen in my life, had lost someone that I loved, had emotional issues or had become depressed or suicidal, then I would feel that maybe this accounted for the dream. But the fact was that I wasn't any of the above. I was just a normal girl growing up in a normal town, filled with very normal people and I was happy.

Beauford was a very small town with a population of 500 which was mainly filled with people who owned farming and agricultural properties.

I lived with my Father John and my mother Kathryn in a two hundred year old plantation house that had been passed down from generation to generation. My brother Will lived in the next town over from us and was married with two small children.

There is a ten year age gap between the two of us as my parents had given up hope of having another child five years after they had Will. I would like to think that I was the miracle child but I think it was more of just arriving when they least expected it.

Being sixteen and having a twenty six year old brother meant that by the time I became slightly interesting to him, he was already on the way out the door to University. So we weren't super close.

My plans have always been to leave Beauford and go to Yale in two years where I will study for my Oncology degree. Then after graduating I would stay in the city for a few years, marry my childhood sweetheart Jaxon and come back to Beauford to raise our children.

I pretty much had it all planned out since the day I met Jaxon at junior high when I saw him walk across the school football field holding the ball in his hands. He was tall and broad with jet black hair and the most stunning green eyes I had ever seen. I had fallen for him quickly after our first date and although we had different upbringings, we both shared a love of the outdoors and our mutual friends.

Jaxon, being the football jock, was always being hit on by girls. I would like to say that I took it all as harmless banter or silly girls that really had to know better. But sometimes when a particular girl decided to drape herself over him like she was his own personal blanket, well the fierce girlfriend side would rear its ugly head and I would imagine my body turning into the hulk and contemplate pummeling them like over ripe watermelons.

He always seemed unaware of how this extra attention would affect me and some of my friends would ask me why I continued to let him get away with it. But I knew Jaxon, I knew that he loved me and it wasn't like he was coming on to any of them. Girls could be bewitching and cruel creatures sometimes and I knew this.

My closest friends had all been with me since primary school. I had two best-girlfriends, Lila and Georgia and my best male friend was Kale. Lila and Georgia had gone through everything at the same time as me. Puberty was so much more fun when you have three girls all changing at the same time. Let's just say the raging arguments followed by tears and the I love you's was always amusing when we were younger. But having Kale thrown in the mix was another added bonus to our friendship. He certainly wasn't the gay best friend that most girls these days would love. Kale was the ultra good looking guy who doesn't know it, totally straight, completely shy and hard-working cowboy type of best friend.

We were always the dreaded gal-pals interfering in his relationships (well according to his ex-girlfriends we were). But Kale just made our friendship calm and gave us some great insights into how boys actually think.

Kale was someone you could depend on to be there for you whenever you needed him and he was also the only male, other than my father, that I told about my dream. We would often walk the five kilometers out to the bridge together and I would tell him any changes in the dream or just voice my frustrations over it. He would hold me as I cried about Anna and the hopelessness of the situation and he would cheer me up by trying to show me how to skip stones across the water, which I could never actually do. I loved him for just being him and for being the person that he was.

_r