When I was five,
they asked what I’d be.
Other kids wanted to fly;
into space, into fame,
into PowerPoint slides and business suits.
They wanted to be astronauts, doctors,
the next-big-thing.
I just wanted to be the beginning
of someone else’s whole world.
They traced stars on their notebooks,
I trace tiny fingers that lie gently on my hand.
They spoke of saving lives,
I thought of holding one.
Gently.
Warm.
Sleep-heavy against my chest.
They called me soft.
Said I’d grow out of it.
“Ambition is louder” they said.
But my dream roots deep like a secret.
A decade later…
still here.
Still aching for lullabies not yet written,
still imagining eyes that mirror mine,
a laugh that will someday
call me home.
I do not crave a stage.
I crave a name only one voice will call me.
A title not printed on certificates—
but breathed between gulps of apple juice
and alphabet soup.
They wanted me to want more.
But they don’t know
how much it is
to want to be a safe place.
A whole universe
to a single heartbeat.
What could be greater
than being the reason someone learns what love feels like?
I do not want a child
to rewrite my story.
I want her to have pages
I never got to turn.
I do not wish to sculpt her
in the shape of my regrets,
I only wish to walk beside her
as she finds her own form.
I want to witness
a mind slowly stretch
into sunlight;
to watch wonder bloom
without planting myself inside it.
Some people climb mountains
to prove they can rise.
I just want to raise
a life that doesn’t have to recover from mine.
I won’t hand her the answers
like fragile heirlooms wrapped in fear.
I’ll teach her to ask,
to doubt,
to dig—
to pull apart the world and build it back
in her own strange, beautiful image.
I don’t want a mirror.
I want a storm I can love without taming.
A question I don’t fear.
A soul I do not own.
And if that isn’t ambition,
what is?
Someday,
when she says Mother,
they’ll hear a word.
But I’ll hear
everything
I ever dared to dream.