all you wanted

"I didn't know that it was so cold and you needed someone to show you the way."

There once was a little girl. And I do mean little. Although she was nearly sixteen years old, she was barely five feet tall and didn't even weigh a hundred pounds. She was a quiet girl, thoughtful, intelligent and full of wit. She lived in an old, creaky house out in the country with her mother, her father, and her baby brother.

This house was old. And creaky. It was built before modern luxuries like electricity and indoor plumbing were commonplace this far out in the country. So the after-the-fact wiring was shoddy and the plumbing was loud.

One cold, windy winter the day, the little girl was at home with her baby brother and the lights went out. Inexplicably taking the radiator with it. The little girl knew that the house would be freezing in a few hours (thank goodness for weather proofing). She needed to get a fire going in the large fireplaces that adorned nearly every room in the old, creaky house. The little girl put her baby brother in his quilted outerwear, put him down in his crib, and grabbed her father's big axe and wood splitter.

About two hundred feet from the back door of the old, creaky house were stacks of large wood. That would needed to be chopped before it could be burnt. So the little girl set to it. She chopped and chopped, until her little body was exhausted. She decided to sit down for just a moment. The little girl sat on the large tree stump she had been using as a chopping base. She rested her head back onto the high wooden fence the wood was stacked up against. And as one might expect dozed off right there in a matter of seconds.

The little girl sat there asleep. Her dreams slowly turned from trudging in stacks of wood across a snowy field to sitting on the sand beside a beach with the sun warming her back. But her beach dream was interrupted. There was suddenly a boy there, maybe five years old. A boy whose face looked so familiar though she couldn't quite place where she knew him. And he grabbed her hand and began pulling her away from the sun. His hand was so cold.

The little girl grudgingly began to stir on her tree stump as the boy in her dreams pulled her farther away from that warm beach sun. She woke with the sudden realization of how cold she was. Her fingers and toes were numb. And when she tried to get up, her whole body ached of cold. The little girl clumsily grabbed as many pieces of wood as her nearly useless hands could maneuver. The walk to the house was torturous but she finally made it.

As the time went on, her baby brother grew. And as the time went on, a sense of deja vu would sweep over the little girl when she looked at his little aging face. Tragedy struck when he was five, and her brother died in a car accident. As the little girl, now twenty years old but still just as small as before, looked into the little coffin her brother lay in at his funeral she could not believe her eyes. She suddenly realized that there lay the boy from all those years ago that dragged her back to life in her dream.

"So I took your hand and we figured out that when the tide comes I'd take you away."