The only memory of ever not hating sand Anakin had was located in what had probably been his younger toddler years. The memory was blurry and felt like the only one that had remained from that time when his brain hadn't held onto memories of specific moments for more than a year at most. That he remembered it at all was probably thanks to the fact that he'd never felt that positively towards sand for the years to come. Toddler Anakin had adored the sand, it had been new, fascinating, smooth and shiny. It ran through his tiny fists flawlessly, took every shape he moved it into. The wind smoothed out any mistakes he might've made while sculpting it or drawing in it. It also eradicated any carefully crafted artwork he might've wanted to show off to his mother, but that was only vaguely annoying at the time.
The first negative experience Anakin had with sand happened not long after that. The other children had dragged him away to play with 'better moldable sand'. He should've been suspicious that that sand had been located in a narrow alley, should've refused to touch the weirdly wet and bright red sand, should've noticed the still warm body lying nearby, the dead eyes staring at them that the other overjoyed children seemingly ignored, but Anakin was a young child, young and despite his slave life still mildly naive and innocent. He'd not thought anything to be wrong until he'd returned home and his mother had almost screamed in shock at the dried blood on his hands. He'd never seen her that close to crying before, a severe sin when one lived on a desert planet. When she'd explained to him why the sand had been red and wet he'd nearly thrown up on her skirt. He didn't because the food in his stomach was rationed.
The next time Anakin felt a negative emotion towards sand it was cold pure fear. Not that the boy who liked to think of himself as fearless would've ever acknowledged it. He'd done something wrong; he couldn't remember what it had been for the life of him, but it must've been bad. Watto, who'd only recently bought them, had been upset and dragged Anakin to the outskirts of Mos Espa despite Shmi's begging protests. There'd been something weird tied to a pole out there that looked and smelled so horrible that Anakin felt nauseous and tried to turn his head away, but Watto had grabbed his chin and forced him to look. And then he'd explained that that there on the pole had been a fellow slave who'd angered his master so much that he'd been bound to that pole before a recent sandstorm as a punishment. He then proceeded to describe in detail how the sandstorm had scraped the slave's flesh off his bones, how it had skinned him alive. Watto didn't explicitly voice a thread, but Anakin had received the warning nonetheless. He'd not said a word for weeks after that and flinched whenever his slave master entered the room. Anakin thought he might've heard his mother cry herself to sleep silently one of those nights.
The third time Anakin felt negatively about sand happened one or two years after that. It was pure panic. Anakin hadn't intended to run into the huge male, he couldn't name the species, it hadn't even been his fault, he hadn't been daydreaming or anything, only felt a strong sense of foreboding in his gut before he'd simply been unable to step out of the guy's way in the crowded street and thus collided with him. The huge man had dragged him away into an alley, thrown him to the ground, kicked and hit him, pressed his face into the sand. There'd been sand everywhere, in his hair, ears, eyes, nose, mouth, throat and Anakin had tried to spit it out, cried, rasped and coughed and screamed for his mother as best as he could as he tried desperately to shove the big man's hands away. He'd seriously thought he'd die being suffocated by sand. At some point he thought he'd heard his mother yelling and only when he heard her scream at the man that he was damaging Watto's property did the huge rough abusing hands leave his battered small body. He was barely coherent as his mother carried him home, her torso occasionally trembling with suppressed sobs. After that day Anakin's overwhelming fear of sand slowly transformed into hatred, seeing as he couldn't escape it, trapped on a desert planet, and wouldn't allow himself to acknowledge that the fearless Anakin Skywalker was scared of something so seemingly pathetic.
Not even a year later another event fuelled Anakin's growing hatred of sand. He was walking through the busy streets at his mother's side when he heard desperate, panicked, fearful screams that everyone else seemed to pointedly ignore, some only sparing a glance from the corner of an eye. Anakin looked into a side street and there was a woman on the ground, in the sand, two men holding her down and tearing at her skirts and somehow Anakin knew that something terrible was about to happen, that the woman's soul would be broken, her body abused, violated, her life and futured ruined. The woman trashed, clouds of sand rising and veiling the gruesome scene and suddenly Anakin felt like he was being pushed into the sand again and it was everywhere, in his mouth, nose, eyes, ears and her panic and desperation were his own and it was his body that wrestled with huge rough abusing hands and- Anakin clamped his hands over his ears and sank to his knees screaming, wanting to banish the sounds and pictures from his head as he pressed his eyes shut. His mother appeared by his side, gathered him into her arms, pressed his face into her shoulder and carried him away. After she'd explained to him that evening what the men had done to that woman in as child friendly terms as possible, Anakin, no longer innocent or oblivious, sometimes woke up at night, feeling as if huge rough abusive hands were touching his body. Despite being fearless he made sure to stay far, far away from people that gave him a bad feeling in his gut from that day on.
The fifth time something negative involving sand happened to solidify Anakin's hatred for it he'd just turned eight. He'd found the remains of a protocol droid in a nearby junk yard and had noticed that it could be reassembled with all the necessary parts. Wanting to give it to his mother as a gift to help her around their quarters he'd dragged it home and started doing just that. That was how he ended up on that specific junk yard late one evening, Tatooine tinged red by the double sunset. He was combing through the hateful sand in a corner where multiple smaller parts had been dumped in an unceremonious pile when his fingers brushed against something soft and somewhat cold, decidedly not metal, buried in the sand. He gulped, a weight settling deep in his stomach, and closed his eyes briefly before he pushed the junk parts aside and started digging. When he uncovered the object, he wished he hadn't. Staring back at him was the not even decayed face of the corpse of an infant, eyes and mouth closed, still the sand seemed to stick to the small face relentlessly. Anakin threw himself to the side and retched despite his better judgement. He didn't know how long he sat there, taking deep breaths, but eventually he rose and went back to the hole he'd made. With his vision blurry from tears that he constantly blinked back, he covered the tiny corpse in sand once again and left the junk yard without any intention of ever returning to it. He had himself back under control to such a degree that no one he knew who met him on the way home noticed something was off, if his mother noticed how he was quieter than usual she didn't say anything, but the dead infant's sand covered face followed him into his dreams.
_______________
Anakin avoided the patch of sand in the room of the thousand fountains in the Jedi temple like the plague in the coming years. Only looking at it made horrid emotions crash down upon his heart and even worse horrible pictures and sounds, snippets of traumatic memories, push themselves to the front of his mind. He complained loudly whenever he was forced to go near it and was scolded for doing so by Obi-Wan who didn't seem to realize that for Anakin sand symbolized death, pain and crushed souls. When he was forced to sit and meditate on it it felt like sitting on lava and he felt the ghostly touch of huge rough phantom hands getting a hold of his body. That meditation session ended with Anakin jumping to his feet and fleeing the room at breakneck speed. To say that Obi-Wan wasn't pleased was an understatement. Despite that Anakin never found the words to explain himself, to recount what he'd seen on Tatooine. And it wasn't only because he would've had to admit that he was scared of something.
______________
When Anakin told Padmé that she was like the opposite of sand he didn't mean her skin. Well, not only her skin. In Padmé's presence he felt the presence of life, not the presence of death. With her he felt safe, with her he didn't expect to find horrible secrets beneath a beautifully twinkling surface. When he was with Padmé he could forget the gruesome uncaring merciless nature of the galaxy.
But in the end, she slipped through his fingers like sand, her life, their love, trickling out of his grip, and as always with sand, he found that there was nothing he could do.
_______________
Author's note
So. Thus ends this...whatever it is. A character study? Don't know, but please let me know how I did. I, and probably everyone else, always thought it pretty obvious that Anakin hated sand because of the negative emotions he connected to it and Tatooine being Tatooine, I didn't have much trouble thinking of things he could've witnessed to get those. Two major parts of Anakin's character were always his fearlessness, that was obviously not as true as he would've liked, and his will to help people. So being faced with really scary things that could happen to him, or more importantly HIS MOTHER, who he put above himself, and having to witness these things without being able to help those who suffered them because of his slave status or lacking physical power as a child etc. would leave him with some sort of trauma, I would imagine. This feeds into his struggles later in life of wanting to be in control in order to be able to help everyone. The fact that he's unable to talk about his trauma or acknowledge his fears, flaws and weaknesses, stems from his experiences on Tatooine where weakness, physically or mentally, pretty much means death, I'd think. So it appears Anakin always tried to hide all of that behind his fragile ego and forced confidence, simply because at first he couldn't and later wouldn't allow himself to show it, probably acting out of habit and a slave mindset (your worth and right to exist is determined by what you can do) no one ever bothered to get him out of. Seriously, a therapist would've had a field day with that boy but alas...
Coming back to my creation above, I tried to give Anakin a noticeable recurring sense of foreboding that hints at his connection to the force and eventually becomes the cause of his heightened reflexes when pod racing once more sharpened, which are really just him knowing/seeing what's about to happen before it actually does as Qui-Gon points out, if I recall that correctly. In the scene with the woman I shaped it into a heightened sense of empathy, enabling Anakin to unintentionally feel her emotions through the force because her trashing in the sand reminds him so strongly of his own experience of assault. I hope all of it seemed reasonable and poor helpless Obi-Wan didn't seem like too much of an arse whenever briefly mentioned. He was simply woefully unprepared to raise a child, and a traumatized one at that.
I'm done rambling now, so I bid you goodbye, have a nice day. And maybe read something nice and light-hearted after this...^^'