I don’t remember my parents’ faces in their entirety. What I remember most clearly is Grandma’s back as she bent over to light the oil lamp, followed by the rustle of the thin mat as she shifted her body to make more room for me.
My childhood nights unfolded in a small plank-walled house with a roof that always creaked when the rain fell. I slept beside Grandma, sharing a thin blanket, while her palm stroked my hair until my breathing settled.
“Go to sleep,” she whispered. “Tomorrow, we start again.”
At the time, I didn’t understand what those words meant. I only knew that as long as Grandma was still lying beside me, the world wasn’t entirely frightening.
She raised me on her own. There were no other hands to carry me when I had a fever, no other voice asking whether I had eaten. Grandma was the one who divided the rice in two, even though her portion was often smaller.
Every morning, before the sun had truly risen, she was already in the kitchen. I heard wood being struck, water being poured, and the small cough she always hid beneath the clatter of pots.
“Wake up, Kiddo. School.”
I often pretended not to hear so I could stay on the mat a little longer. Grandma never got angry. She simply sat at the edge of the mat and rubbed my back.
“If you work hard at school, one day you’ll be able to choose your own life.”
I believed her before I understood what choosing meant.
On days when money was tight, Grandma sold fried snacks in front of the house. She stood for hours in the heat, then came home with oil clinging to the hem of her clothes. I helped her count the coins, and whenever the amount fell short, she would smile as though we had just won something.
“What matters is that we got through today.”
Years later, I understood: Grandma wasn’t teaching me how to become rich. She was teaching me how not to give up when life gave us very little.
The mat was never truly soft. Its weave left lines on my cheek every morning. And yet that was where I first felt I had a place of my own. That was where Grandma covered me with her own body when the night wind slipped through the gaps in the walls.
I grew from small things: warm rice divided in two, a school uniform stitched and restitched, and wrinkled hands that never stopped working.
When I was accepted into a secondary school in the city, Grandma sold her late husband’s bracelet to pay for my travel expenses. I cried and refused.
“If this bracelet stays in the drawer, it won’t be able to protect you,” she said. “Let it become a path instead.”
I carried those words away with me. For the first time, I slept alone in a cramped room I rented near school. The mattress was thicker than our mat, but I couldn’t sleep. There was no sound of Grandma’s breathing beside me. There was no hand searching for my forehead when I grew restless.
That night, I realized that leaving home didn’t mean I had stopped needing someone.
I wrote to her every week. Grandma replied in large, slanted handwriting, always ending with the same words: don’t forget to eat, don’t be afraid to fail, come home when you’re tired.
I didn’t yet know that one day I would remember those words longer than anyone’s voice.
Because before I became someone people knew, I was only a little child sleeping on a thin mat beneath a low ceiling, accompanied by an old woman who chose to love me with every last bit of strength she had.