Chapter Three

My mind likes to wander a lot. My mind, to me, is a very funny thing. It recalls the weirdest things at the strangest and, sometimes, the most inconvienient times. These events that I remember may have happened during that day but they also may have happened years previously and they just come back with no trigger at all. However, lately it has been happening more and more often.

I've read about premonitions and people dreaming the events that happen in their lives before they do but I personally just can't believe it. If your whole life is planned out for you by some "higher power" and I've only had it easy so far, then I don't know what to do. If I could look ahead and I only saw more negative, I wouldn't be able to cope. Compared to others my struggle obviously has not been that hard but to me that turmoil, that inner turmoil is something I still struggle with every day and having to keep it all in doesn't make things any better.

I keep coming back to this one time when I was about 6 years old and I lived in a small town with my parents and there was this little park in the centre of the place and it had these yellow monkey bars which, looking back on it, were not that high up at all but at the time it felt like you would die if you fell from them. They were scary but in a good way. That sounds very contradictory but whatever.

The park was about an acre big which, for a park, is a pretty decent size. Considering the size of this park, you would think that there would be more than enough kids for it to always be busy and for there to be whining children looking to go on certain things all the time, right? Well you would be wrong there. While these amazing monkey bars were a beautiful yellow and they seemed so high up, they were very creaky and, if you looked close enough, you could see specks of rust beginning to form on them. The park had been there for decades before my family had moved to what was once a village. It had become a small industrial town over the years as it was in close proximity to a few of the bigger towns and cities and this meant instead of families and children living here, businesses and firms were finding a home here in their place.

The memory of one particular day has stuck in my mind for the past while. My parents were both working so I was wandering the streets and came to the park which, at this point, I had never seen before as I was pretty new. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Not everything was all sunshine and rainbows though. The memory gets really fuzzy here for some reason.

As I was about to walk past this magnificent park, I heard sobbing of some sort. What I saw next caught me by surprise. A girl about my age at the time had her arms wrapped around one of her knees and was crying without showing any sign of stopping so I responded in the only way I knew how. I went over to her to try to find out what was wrong and she tells me that she fell and scraped her knee and I find out that she's actually on her own too. I try to help her as best as I can and I can vaguely remember us running around afterwards but the memory ends there. I didn't find out her name or anything.

She had hair that was the most delicate shade of pink you can imagine, and then some. She had sapphire eyes that you could stare into all day and you would never get tired of them. She had a hastily tied red ribbon holding her fringe back from falling down her face and everything about her screamed innocence.

This dream is a rather pleasant one compared to the dreams I have had and sometimes continue to have but I'm always left feeling the same throughout the dream. Sure, the nice parts are wonderful and all but the dream starts very bitter. Who likes seeing a young, helpless girl crying? The worst part is that there is no definitive end to this "fantasy" of sorts. It just cuts off like someone who has plugged the TV out suddenly before repeating, over and over again and the end result, when I wake up, is always the same.

I'm left yearning.