Once Upon A Teardrop

I woke shaking, drenched in perspiration, with tears running down my cheeks. I’d been dreaming. But it wasn’t just any normal dream. It was all too real and would never let me rest. How do people live on the edge of horror and not die from it?

Looking over at my husband, Zack, I was grateful that I hadn’t wakened him. Often my dream left me screaming, trembling and soaked with sweat, shattering an otherwise silent night.

For the past three years I had been afraid to go to sleep, fearing I’d waken in terror. At times, my sleep would be relatively quiet for two-month stretches, and I would wonder if perhaps the dream was fading. But it never failed to return in 3-D, living color, and surround sound to haunt my soul again.

 

At age nineteen, I had been a somewhat sheltered and dreamy girl, with visions of living happily ever after, so when Ethan Hamilton the Third dazzled me with his smile and began using words like us and future in the same sentence, I fell hard and fast.

Raised in a Christian home, I had spent my childhood playing with dolls and dreaming of home and family, so was it any wonder that Ethan, who said he loved God as much as he loved me, captured my heart with his tempting word pictures?

As a child of the sixties, I wasn’t into love-ins or protests, but I grew excited, filling my hope chest with mundane things, like hand-embroidered tea towels and His and Hers pillowcases, monogrammed with an E and a K.