Robin Sinclair

On Transness, Vitiligo, and Tenderness.

Articulate half a lifetime spent detached from your reflection.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Perhaps it can be quantified in minutes
stretched between the knowledge that
you, historically, are blandly ordinary
yet somehow feel completely alien.

Not working?

Maybe try to describe it in lumens.
How bright was the bathroom mirror in that airport motel
where you first noticed your missing pigment?
Not missing like when a white friend projects whiteness onto you
or missing like all of the times you felt obligated to be fucked as a gender you are not,
but just...
missing?

Perhaps it would be better to explain what is rather than what isn’t.
After all, how do you name the space where hollowness exists?
Can you cluster decades into neat labels
like when your therapist uses depersonalization and dissociation?

Maybe we should start at when you cried at your own fingertips
scratching along a wall, then tree bark,
because you could feel. It wasn’t just the feeling, but the you that was present.

Start at when you wrapped your arms around your chest
to hold yourself in comfort and felt new flesh, finally,
where it should have been all along.

Start at how you were touched,
no, not touched,
experienced,
reflected back by another how you’d always hoped you would be.

Start by looking into a mirror, tracing the patches on your face
as you remember a girl in grammar school who said
“your skin looks dirty.” Keep tracing, and remember
how alone you felt, but how common you later learned this to be.
Go on, trace, and remember your life before your body became yours,
how alone, how common.
Keep tracing, owning each inch, whispering to your reflection,
“One day soon, I will wholly love you.”