"Skin Made of Stars"

I have always believed that I am made of constellations.

Not in the romantic way people say when they’re trying to be poetic, but in the truest, most ancient sense. There is stardust in my bones, the remnants of suns that burned before this planet had a name. My skin glimmers—not with any physical light, but with the quiet shimmer of memory, of time, of the things that came before me.

On nights when the moon is thin and silver, I feel it most. I lie beneath the sky, and the darkness doesn’t feel empty. It feels like home. The constellations whisper to me, speaking in a language older than speech. They remind me that beauty is not the shine you wear for others—it is the light that survives even after collapse.

Once, I hated my skin.

It was too marked, too imperfect, too much a map of my history. I would trace the little scars and think, Here is where I broke. Here is where I fell. I didn’t know then that stars are born in violence—that their light is forged in the crushing grip of gravity and heat. I didn’t understand that beauty is not the absence of flaw, but the presence of story.

My grandmother used to tell me that every freckle was a planet. That each one had mountains, oceans, and skies of its own. “You are a galaxy,” she’d say, brushing my hair with hands that smelled faintly of cinnamon and rose water. I never believed her, but now I wonder if she was right. Perhaps she saw more than I could then—how my skin held the echo of universes, how each mark was its own small sun.

There is a moment just before dawn when the stars fade, but the sky has not yet turned blue. In that in-between, I think about the people who have tried to dim me. The voices that told me my beauty had rules. The mirrors that reflected not my light, but their shadows. They tried to shrink my sky into a single star—manageable, ordinary.

But you can’t trap a galaxy in a jar.

I carry the Milky Way on my shoulders. The Orion Nebula curls in the small of my back. My hands hold fragments of the Andromeda’s spiral. Every time I move, the universe moves with me.

When I smile, it is a supernova.

When I cry, it is a meteor shower—beautiful even in falling.

When I love, it is a comet’s path across the darkness, impossible to ignore.

I have learned that identity is not a fixed point in space—it is a shifting orbit, pulled by forces we can’t always see. And beauty? Beauty is not the perfect photograph of the night sky—it is the way the stars keep shining even when no one is watching.

People will tell you that you are too much, or not enough. That you are too bright, or not bright enough. That your colors do not match the constellations they’ve memorized. But they have only charted a fraction of the universe. You are uncharted space. You are the black hole and the spiral galaxy, the dying star and the new world forming in its dust.

I think of the first astronomers—how they looked up and gave names to the lights. How they drew lines between stars to tell stories about gods and monsters. I wonder what story they would draw if they could see me now. Would they map my scars into the shape of a warrior? Would they call my birthmark the Shadow Moon? Would they see the faint, pulsing light beneath my ribs and call it the Heart Star?

If I am made of stars, then I am also made of their deaths. That is the price of light—it is always born from something ending. But endings are not erasures. They are transformations.

So I walk through the world with my head tilted back, letting the galaxies in my skin speak for themselves. I don’t cover them anymore. I don’t dim them for the comfort of others. My freckles are planets, my scars are meteor trails, my eyes are twin moons caught in orbit.

When people look at me now, some still only see the surface. They see the patterns they’ve been taught to recognize. But others—those who have looked into the night sky long enough—see the vastness. They see the distance, the depth, the quiet fire.

And when they ask me who I am, I no longer hesitate.

I tell them:
I am not made of glass.
I am not made of porcelain.
I am not made to be held still.

I am made of stars.