Serendipity (S. Black)

ELEVEN

"may i live like the lotus, at ease in muddy water"

*

Eva's paintbrush swished across the large square canvas with the delicacy of one longing to get lost in the colors. She closed her eyes and pictured the ocean, its rolling waves and swirls of blue, before diving back into her work with newfound clarity.

Eva grew up in a creative household, a place where music wafted out the windows and ink spilled out of the doorways. Her parents, Amelia and Jonathon, lived as artists. Not a steady profession, even in the Muggle world, but the joy in their hearts always meant more to them than the money in their pockets.

Jonathan Taylor worked all thirty years of his too-short life on the docks, hauling boxes from sea to shore for minimum wage. By day, he appeared as an average man trying to make something of himself. By night, poetry spilled onto pages of a leather journal he'd bought at a five-and-dime because he simply couldn't contain his thoughts anymore. Someone had caught his fancy, a girl he met on the boat one day, a girl with a curly blonde ponytail and a dream to leave a legacy. She never did change the world, but she changed his.

Amelia Bell ran away from home at the age of eighteen, not because she hated her home, but because she couldn't wait a minute more. There was so much world out there, so much to discover. How could she stay in that same town longer than she had to? She hopped on a boat and just sailed for years. Somewhere in the time passed is where she met Jonathan, a man who could use words in a way she never knew possible.

After eight months of knowing each other, they got married, and after two years, they had a daughter, Eva Brandi. Eva because it meant 'life,' and Brandi for the song of the same name (though a different spelling). She brought joy to life that they had never experienced. After a long day at the docks, Jonathan always knew he'd return to his home where his two favorite girls would be waiting with identical grins. After dinner, Amelia would play guitar by the window while Jonathan wrote his poems and Eva played with her dolls. And life was perfect.

Amelia and Jonathan talked of having other children, but money was tight enough with one child. He continued to work for the boat company, but also continued to write. His words no longer were an escape from life, but instead a way to document just how blessed he was. Amelia stayed in their paint-chipped ranch, watching little Eva and writing songs to sing her to sleep. Her soft voice rose and fell like the June wind, warm in the fading sun and carrying a wistful nostalgia of long ago.

Eva skipped through her early days wearing a bright smile on her face and her heart on her secondhand sleeve. Her mother's words always echoed in her mind: Let your smile change the world, but never let the world change your smile.

Her parents worried: Eva seemed lonely for such a sweet child. Soon, though, their worries shifted, because Jonathan's cough never went away like the doctors said it would. It only grew worse.

In the years after, every harsh cough made Eva cringe, every sickness caused a new wave of anxiety. Cancer, they told their nine-year-old daughter, each parent holding one of her hands tightly. Cancer, this disgusting word they somehow had to fight now. The girl pictured it not as a disease, but as a black monster eating away at her precious father's lungs, weathering them like the sea erodes rock. Because you can fight a monster in the closet. Even a fairytale knight can't fight a complicated-sounding disease. Neither could Jonathan.

A month after her tenth birthday, no one was there to protect her from the monsters anymore. Her mother's music took a dark turn, incorporating pitiful wails and unfinishable lyrics. No more than twenty people attended his funeral. Fate gave him a quiet beginning, a quiet middle, and a quiet end. She didn't cry a single tear in the church. She didn't cry for days. When she found his leather notebook of poems a week later, though, the emotions overflowed her. The man she admired most of all, the man who spent his life watching his dream slip away so others could have theirs, was truly gone.