Dear Diary - The Premonition: Chapter 2 Asha's Beginnings
Dear Diary,
I was twelve when the dream ambushed me.
I’d snuck out after curfew (again) and fallen asleep against Kelly in the woods, frost glittering on every needle. Then the trees just… parted.
One clearing. One rough table hacked from an old yew stump. One clay bowl in the middle shaped like a tiny cradle. Inside: half a warm loaf, a pinch of salt, one drop of milk.
Women stood around it. Real ones. Not glowing, not floating—just standing there like they’d been waiting their whole lives.
Mira (who I hadn’t even met yet) with her trademark pigtails. Maryam, quiet as snowfall. The Rosengarth grandma from Mum’s stories, hands still dusted with flour. Others I only felt (mothers who’d carried kids across deserts, oceans, checkpoints).
At the center was the oldest woman I’d ever seen. Her belly was a map of every kid she’d loved and lost. Her eyes said she was done apologising for taking up space.
“You keep asking why the people who actually make life never get a seat at the tables that decide whose life counts,” she told me. “One day the table answers.”
Only one chair.
“That’s the point,” Maryam said. “One voice they keep forgetting.”
Mira slid a cracked stone across the wood. Weird old letters bleeding together.
“Long ago some guys argued right here about whether Jesus was fully God,” she said. “Today the same lie is back—only now it ranks kids. Some bodies get full spark, some get scraps. Same heresy, new packaging.”
The old woman tore the loaf. Steam curled up like it was alive.
She handed me the first piece.
I sat. The bowl was warm, like every kid I’d ever hidden in the oaks was kicking inside it.
Words came out of me I didn’t know I knew:
“No more kids used as bargaining chips. Not for borders. Not for peace deals. Not for anybody’s version of God. If even one child is worth less, the whole thing collapses.”
Mira dropped a single thornless rose into the bowl. Middle of winter.
The table lit up from the inside.
They started humming (that low, fierce sound mums make when the danger’s finally gone and their kid is asleep).
I woke up crying, mouth tasting real bread.
Thought it was just a dream. Told no one. Dreams fade, right?
They don’t. Not the ones the woods gives you.
Fast-forward here we are in November 2025.
I am wrecked, wiped out, from another day sneaking food to kids the world keeps trying to erase. I walk into the exact same clearing to light the fire.
The table is there. Real wood. Real bowl. Real warm bread.
Mira (now twelve, same age I was in the dream) is waiting with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen.
On the table: a fresh-printed photo. Pope Leo XIV and Patriarch Bartholomew standing in the actual ruins of Nicaea, heads bowed over the stones where they first fought that old lie.
Underneath, one sentence:
“There is a new Arianism today… a subordination of the Word of God to worldly ways of thinking.”
My knees buckle.
It wasn’t a dream.
It was a premonition.
I sit in the one chair.
Mira drops another thornless rose into the bowl.
And the woods finally stops feeling like a graveyard.
It feels like the beginning of the answer.
Kids are not for sale. Not ever. Not for any reason.
And the table just got its first real voice. This is weird.
Asha
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