Tiny Courageous

 Tiny Courageous

My mother was beautiful in way that was plain. She'd be lost in a crowd but you could feel her love just surround you. The same went for her voice; it wasn't particularly memorable or loud but it just was. My father called her his Quiet Strength. She had a name for me as well, but that's not important because I never thought it fit.

She only called me by that name when she would lay in her bed, the light from the lamp covering her sweaty head just barely. She' d hold my hand and whisper in my ear the secrets that God sent to her.

But I hated God.

He'd giver her visions that would send her into violent convulsions. She'd grasp at the air as her pupils would open for all the light it could gather. Her limbs would tighten and she looked like she'd die any second. All I could do was hug myself in the corner, trying to block the sound of my mother's labored breathing and my father's desperate, "it's okay baby, it's okay."

It wasn't okay.

God took my mother from me. And my father. I was always told that God's way was love of the highest, but this wasn't love. To throw a child into the world without the love of her family? I came to cry in the night as I wished for the moments that my mother would lie in bed telling me she loved me and that she'd be fine. And one day, the tears wouldn't even come. Either I just got lazy or whatever. The loss of my parents made something different inside of me.

I began to have convulsions too.

But these were on the inside; invisible earthquakes of strength. Soon, I became like my mother, silent but watching. The power she wielded over the world, that tiny amount of bravery coursed through my veins. She gave me her love, her will of God and it became my own amount of courage.

I met a man that my parents would've loved.

He was sweet and gentle and very caring. He never aged but I did. I laid on my deathbed, holding his trembling hand as his face was bitterly red with tears that would rub violently against his skin. His fingers would try to remain calm but I could tell they were losing the tiny amounts of happiness that remained. On my last day, I held my husband's hand and repeated to him the same line that my father would repeat to me.

"It's okay baby, it's okay." And it was, because just as I was to my mother, he was to me. His heart spoke to mine and I realized that while I huddled in the corner of my youth, the name my mother would call me in her darkest hours became what I was.

As I died, my husband's lips cautiously, lovingly and sadly formed the words that my ears took to be the sweetest thing I could hear. They were the exact words my mother would say to me before she fell asleep in the aftermath of her violent visions.

"Goodnight, my Tiny Courageous."