starskin

The first spot appeared when I was eleven

A patch of white

Oblong

Imperfect

Paper-pale

Hovering just over the doorknob of my hipbone

Like a tiny UFO

Alien

Unidentified

A strange, bright little portal

Light shining through a keyhole

Right there, just there

Singular and pure

.

To me, a worrisome child, it was surely sickness

What else would erase the color of my skin

Uninvited

Unknown

In a moment of anxious ingenuity

Or desperation

I carefully placed the sticky image

Of a temporary tattoo over it

A sun

With contented smile and wiggling rays

Glittering

Bright

A dollar store new age mask

.

My allowance was spent on sheets of tattoos that summer

Yin-yangs

Dragons

Hibiscus

Turquoise, gold, ruby, indigo and magenta

Desperately

Awkwardly

Covering what I thought was killing me

Like a patch on worn out jeans

A quick ix on a blown out tire

Superficial

Temporary

And no one noticed

.

That is

Until the spots blossomed

The way morning glories take over a yard

Crawling

Multiplying

My pointy, cow bone hips

Grew into a patchwork of nothingness

White kid tan skin the color of conservatively toasted marshmallow

Interrupted with spatters of milk

Widening swaths of emptiness

Spreading like ink on paper

Or August wildfire devouring the underbrush

Unpredictable and rampant

.

They grew as I did

In dips and hollows

Knobbly joints

Creases

The place at the turn of my lips

The knocking bones of my ankles

At my fingertips

Eating and eating the pigment of my past years

Medium ivory rose

Turned alabaster

Until nothing but freckles remained

Smudges

Moments

.

Vitiligo

The word bore such weight and strangeness to me

When I stopped hiding them, I named them distantly

Objectively

Cow spots

Giraffe patches

Until someone stumbled into my life

A wild lost boy that listened to too much Green Day

Laughed in cartoon colors

Smiled like artificial cherry flavoring

And told me my spots looked like stars

Galaxies

Moonlight

.

I became a canvas

Emptiness metamorphized into everything

An endlessly expanding universe of possibility

And marvelous question

A book upon which

I could write anything

Fear shimmered into beauty

A stellar nursery of creation

My skin became a treasure

Sparkling

Stark

Mine