By Akanksha Patil
In a place that was neither dark nor light, where shadows swayed like whispers, she saw her mother for the first time since she was two years old.
The air here was strange—dense, yet weightless. Her mother looked almost as she had in the framed photo tucked in her bedside drawer, the one no one in her family liked her looking at. Her mother stood in the soft, silvered space, eyes warm, tentative, holding a sorrow she couldn’t quite hide.
“Mom,” she whispered, testing the word on her tongue, feeling it strange, foreign. She realized she’d never actually said it to her, never had the chance.
“Hello, my love.” Her mother’s voice trembled, breaking the silence in this place that felt suspended between dreams and reality. There was a warmth in her tone, a quiet gentleness, as if she had waited for this moment since the day she left.
The daughter didn’t know what to say, where to begin. She wanted to tell her mother everything, to ask her everything, but she felt like a stranger standing in front of someone she was told she should know. She searched for a place to begin and found herself asking the one question that had haunted her since childhood.
“Why did you leave me?”
Her mother’s eyes fell, and she drew a shaky breath, the weight of her regret as palpable as the silence between them. “I was so… lost. I thought you’d be better off without me. I thought maybe you’d find love with others who could give you what I couldn’t. I was wrong.”
The daughter’s heart clenched, her mother’s words striking chords in her she hadn’t known were there. All her life, she’d battled an emptiness that felt strange to her—an ache for a mother she hadn’t even known. It was like missing a shadow, like reaching for an outline that was never filled in.
“But I grew up not even knowing you,” she said, her voice barely louder than a whisper. “I spent years wondering if it was wrong to feel your absence. I felt guilty. Like… like I was trespassing on something sacred if I missed you.”
Tears welled up in her mother’s eyes, and she took a step closer, reaching out, though she didn’t touch her. “I should’ve been there. I should’ve stayed. You deserved a mother’s arms, a mother’s love. I was… I was afraid you’d inherit my pain.”
Her mother’s words twisted In her, and suddenly all the anger and sadness she’d buried for so long came rushing up.
“But you gave it to me anyway, didn’t you? By leaving, you left me with all your emptiness. I had to make sense of this absence, this… this haunting feeling of never quite belonging. I grew up wondering why no one talked about you, why it felt like I was the only one carrying your memory. No one understood that I missed something I never had. How do you even explain that?”
She didn’t realize she was crying until her mother’s face blurred in front of her. She tried to swallow the tears, to hold them back like she always had. She’d spent her whole life pretending not to feel her mother’s loss. Every time she’d asked her father about her, he’d turned away, his face tight, shutting her out from a grief he’d buried.
Her mother’s voice was a soft tremor. “I can’t undo the hurt I left you with. But please know I never wanted you to suffer. I thought… I thought you’d be better without me, without the shadow I was becoming.”
“You left me with the shadow anyway,” she said, her voice breaking. “Every day, I wondered if I’d be different if you’d stayed. I convinced myself I was strong, that I didn’t need you, that I’d grown up fine. But I felt the void, Mom. I felt it every time I watched other girls with their mothers and pretended not to feel like I’d been robbed of something sacred.”
Her mother’s face twisted with pain, her regret an echo in the silence around them. “You deserved a mother who would stay and teach you what love looks like, who’d hold you when you cried and laugh with you when you were happy. I should’ve been that for you.”
The daughter looked down, her fingers brushing against her own skin, as if searching for an anchor. “But you weren’t. And I don’t know how to forgive that. I don’t know how to stop wanting something I never even knew.”
They stood in silence for a long time, her mother’s gaze heavy with sorrow, her own heart a storm of emotions too tangled to name. She’d always thought that one day she would forget, that the yearning would fade. But now, facing her mother, it all felt raw and unhealed.
“I missed you every day,” she said, her voice softer now, like a confession. “I just didn’t know if I was allowed to.”
Her mother reached out then, her hand hovering just above her cheek, close enough that she could feel the warmth she’d craved all her life. “I’m sorry,” her mother whispered, tears spilling down her face. “For everything. I wish I could have been what you needed. I wish I could’ve been strong enough for you.”
The daughter closed her eyes, letting her mother’s presence sink into her, as if memorizing the feel of her, the weight of the apology she’d needed for so long. She knew this meeting was her mother’s final gift, the one thing she had left to give: her regret, her love, her sorrow.
And as they stood together in that liminal space, where time seemed to pause and the world faded away, she felt the ache in her heart soften, just a little. It wasn’t forgiveness, not yet. But it was a beginning, a step toward understanding the mother she’d missed but never truly known.
When she opened her eyes again, her mother’s face was fading, her figure dissolving into the shadows. She felt an emptiness settle in her chest, but it was different this time—less of a void, and more of a quiet, a stillness that felt like peace.
And in that silence, she whispered, “Goodbye, Mom,” feeling the ache give way to something softer, something almost like grace.
By Akanksha Patil
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