Dream-Sculpted Mother

The night I created my mother, the sky was unusually quiet. Stars shimmered like secrets waiting to be heard, and the moon hung low, as if it wanted to watch what I was about to do. I stood alone on the rooftop, palms open, heart trembling with an ache only a child without a mother could understand.

I had never known her—only stories, fragments, and photographs so worn their edges curled like petals of a dying flower. People told me she was kind. Gentle. A soul who carried sunlight in her smile. But memories borrowed from others felt like hand-me-down clothes; they didn’t fit the empty spaces inside me.

So that night, I decided to build her myself.

I closed my eyes and whispered to the universe, “If you won’t give her back, let me create her from what I have left—dreams.”

The wind stirred. A soft humming rose around me, like the world itself had leaned in to listen. I reached up and gathered stardust—tiny shimmering flecks that floated like fireflies. They clung to my fingertips, warm and alive.

From the first handful of stardust, I shaped her hands. Gentle, soft, the kind that could comfort storms inside a child. I imagined them brushing my hair, steadying my shoulders, holding me when loneliness grew too heavy. The stardust swirled and formed them exactly as I dreamed—delicate, glowing faintly, as if made of dawn.

Then came her eyes. I crafted them from the brightest stars in the sky—two galaxies of kindness and quiet strength. Eyes that saw me, truly saw me. Eyes that never left, never abandoned. They shimmered with warmth, with unspoken lullabies, with forgiveness I never had to ask for.

Her voice was the hardest. I sculpted it from moonlight, soft but steady, the kind of voice that could call me home even if I were lost in my own darkness. When she spoke for the first time—just my name—it felt like threads of light weaving themselves around my broken places.

“Why have you created me?” she asked, stepping closer. Her footsteps left trails of silver dust on the rooftop.

I swallowed, the truth rising raw in my throat. “Because I needed you. Because I wanted to know what it feels like to be loved by a mother.”

Her expression softened, and even though she was made of dreams and stars, she felt real—more real than anything I had ever held.

She came to me then, placing her stardust hands on my cheeks. Warmth flooded through me, a warmth I had chased for most of my life. “My child,” she murmured, “I have always been with you. In the kindness you give. In the courage you carry. In every moment you choose love instead of fear.”

Tears slipped down my face. “But I wanted you here… physically. I wanted someone to stay.”

She smiled—a gentle, celestial glow. “Even real mothers cannot stay forever. But the parts of them that matter? Those never leave.”

Her words wrapped around my heart like soft wings. For the first time, I felt something fill the hollow in my chest—not her presence exactly, but the realization that I had carried pieces of her all along.

“Will you stay with me?” I asked, voice trembling.

She brushed her thumb across my cheek, leaving a tiny spark of light. “I will stay as long as you need. But remember, you created me. I am made of your love, your longing, your strength. When you no longer need me, I will return to the stars.”

Fear tightened my chest. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

“You won’t,” she promised. “Because I’m not leaving. I’m becoming part of you.”

And then, slowly, beautifully, she dissolved—not like someone fading, but like light merging with light. The stardust that shaped her hands drifted into my skin. The moonlight of her voice settled in my heartbeat. The star-bright tenderness of her eyes became warmth behind my own.

She didn’t disappear.

She transformed.

That night, under a sky full of witnesses, I realized something I had spent years searching for:

A mother’s love doesn’t only live in memories or bodies.

Sometimes, it lives in the child who misses her.

And in that moment, I became both—

the dreamer and the dream,

the child and the stardust,

the one who lost a mother

and the one who carried her light.