My mother is a star.

I am half—half of the earth, half of the heavens.

Cut me, and I might bleed silver. My skin is a rich brown, the exact shade of my human father’s skin, but my hair is long and thick and frosted like the moon. In my chest burns a fiery core that beats in time with the music of the spheres, their song deep and layered with dreams.

My mother is a star, one of many bright jewels who sing praises in the skies, who view us from on high. She chose to come down and make a life on Earth, but it wasn’t long before she yearned to go home. Nothing could truly hold her here—not my father’s proposal of marriage, not my birth into the world, not even our nightly dances together in the yard after devouring the dinner my father had cooked, when we’d flee the sink full of dishes to spin and turn, washed in the light of her family above. Our family.

She watches me now from her old throne, one more twinkle in the constellation Pushya, a figure as distant as the characters in the bedtime stories she once loved to tell me. In the evening, I see her clearly, laughing with her companions, radiant. Sometimes I catch rare glimpses of her during the day, when the sky is blue and everything is warm and golden, and it’s almost like having her with me again. Some nights, while the world slumbers, I raise my head to the coal-dark heavens and dream I can even speak to her.

Yet I can’t touch her anymore, can’t go with her to the park, can’t have her take me shopping or hug me or scold me or just be in the same room with me.