I. Mirror

When I don’t smile, my mouth has a feline tendency to curve down. A collapsed letter C. I don’t have anyone in my life who can confirm I vacated my first mother’s womb this way because I was adopted. I am an adopted person. I am an adoptee.

When a woman in Colombia gives birth, she is said to dar a la luz, to give or bring a child into the light. A matter of months after I was given to the light, I was given to an orphanage on the outskirts of Bogotá, bequeathed a legacy of uncharted territories, and the middle name Catalina. A coincidence with my cat-like features, to be sure, if I can be sure of anything. In a predominantly Spanish-speaking and Catholic country, it is more likely than not that I was named after a relative or Santa Catalina, patron saint of philosophers and students.

Did my first mother understand she was feeding an interrogator, investigator, and examiner into the river’s mouth? Perhaps my inquisitive mind is not nature at all, but nurture, arising from my post-partum, post-mother, post-first family existence? I will never know.

To be a singular specimen, a tiny island nation, is jarring. Unsettling. Destabilizing. When I brought my daughter into the light thirty years after arriving on a foreign shore, I surveyed every inch of her body, searching for an echo of my own. Even in utero, from the three-dimensional sonogram images, I saw a piece of me in her or her in me. In the boundaries of her profile, the longitude of her eyes, the downward slope of her mouth, a turned-down C, I recognized a twin topography. Inside the terra incognita of my wondrous body, I had manufactured a mirror, the only reflection I have that shares my cells.


II. A Compendium of Scars

Two half-moon indentations on left shoulder, year unknown.

Similar scars mark those of us vaccinated across Latin America during the early 1980s. This fact leaves a larger impression than the needle.

Three-centimeter rivulet on left knee cap, circa 1989.

A bloody crevasse erupts when my soft flesh makes impact with New England tundra during a soccer game. The boyish-faced intern at the ER quips, “You’ll never be a swimsuit model,” wounding my prepubescent heart more fiercely than the frozen ground.

Nine-centimeter river originating at the ridge of left knee cap, 1996 & 1997. Diptych.

Evidence of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction. The first rupture from a high school soccer game the day of my friend’s funeral. A friend who dies in a car crash on Friday the 13th. A fellow adoptee who haunts me when I think of the day a strait inside me was born.

The second rupture from a high school dance on a leafy college campus. A boy, flailing on the dance floor, crashes into my wounded knee from behind. I never see his face or know his name. The second surgeon repairs me with a cadaver’s patellar tendon. New life from old. A resurrection.

The after X-ray shows screws drilled into my bones but my ACL remains a ghostly cloud. In an X-ray, so named for the algebraic unknown, soft tissue trauma is impossible to detect.

S-shaped chain of hills behind left ear, 2002.

Otoplasty, a surgical procedure to correct congenital ear deformities, involves scoring the ear’s cartilage with small incisions followed by sutures along the back of the protruding ear to pin it into a more desirable shape.

Now that I am fixed, would my first mother recognize me? Did she abandon me because of my asymmetry?

Seventeen years later, my son is born with a matching set of ears yet missing the same antihelical fold. My son, brought into the light from a womb that is not mine. My son, whose prominauris is easily corrected non-surgically within his first month of life. My son, who shares the scars from adoption but not the scars from being called “Dumbo.”

One-and-a-half-centimeter curve along metacarpophalangeal joint of left index finger, 2003.

Seven sweeping stitches repair a gash from removing an avocado pit with a chef knife. Crimson blooms on an ivory dish towel while waiting in the ER. Days later, I remove the last threads from my healed finger while visiting my orphanage in Colombia.

J-shaped railroad track spanning upper right lateral cartilage of the nose, 2022.

From just below the tear duct of my right eye to the tip of my nose, lie the remains of nineteen stitches from a Mohs surgery. Named for the surgeon who pioneered the process of removing slices of cancerous skin one layer at a time until only cancer-free tissue remains.

Was this ticking time bomb encrypted in my genes?

III. Margins

Waxing and waning with the moon, I think it is a pimple. Appearing above the hill of my nostril, from a distance, the red dot could be a small stud nose piercing. Several moons later, a trip to the dermatologist confirms it is basal cell carcinoma, the less deadly but still not desirable form of skin cancer, and it needs to be removed. As soon as possible.

Mere days before Mother’s Day, I arrive at the clinic for the outpatient procedure. After the initial sting from the local anesthetic injected into my septum, I do not feel the first slice into the uppermost layer of my cancerous skin. Willing my mind to another plane of existence as my face is poked and prodded, I close my eyes and attempt to focus on my audiobook, but thoughts claw their way out of my subconscious.

Is this cancer a form of karmic retribution?

I have always loved the sun, luxuriated in its rays. Still, I slathered myself in sunblock, not baby oil. I did not use a reflector or tanning bed like my adoptive sister did, hoping to multiply the melanin in her pale Irish and Eastern European skin. She, who longed to be browner, sustained a second-degree burn one summer after falling asleep sunbathing. She, who spent a week slathered in green cream, wanted my skin color but did not want me.

Growing up, my adoptive siblings complained I was my father’s favorite. In my reality, I was my brother’s other sister. The sister nearly a decade younger, imported from a foreign shore. The sister on the playground singing the Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong.”

During the Mohs surgery, patients wait as the excised cells are examined under a light microscope. If cancer remains, the surgeon must dig deeper. While my first layer of skin is magnified and scrutinized I sit, bandaged, in the waiting room. I look at the fish tank. I look at my phone. I look back into the reaches of my mind to sun-drenched beaches in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. Sun-scorched deserts in New Mexico and Peru. Sun-bleached plazas in Colombia and Ecuador.

Like the View-Master reel I will gift my husband next month for Father’s Day, images flash across my mind. Click. I am eight years old, wearing Kelly green shorts and a white collared shirt with the camp logo: a series of five-pointed stars representing the camp’s namesake, Vega. Vega, one of the Northern hemisphere’s brightest stars in the summer sky. The girl in the photograph will spend eight sun-dappled summers in Maine as a camper. Without anyone to stand in contrast to, camp will feel like freedom. Even with neon lines of zinc on her nose popularized by the water ski instructors, the sun will kiss her, bestowing a golden glow upon her face, arms, legs.

Under the sickly fluorescent lights of the shower house, she will inspect her tan lines, comparing where the country of her before-skin meets the oceans of her after-skin. Her campmates, mostly melanin-deficient, will admire her effortless tan.

Under the knife once again, the surgeon slices a second layer. Though my nose is the only site under construction, my whole being is an open wound. This is not the first time my body has betrayed me. Click. I am fifteen years old, wearing a tan and a bikini as I’m strapped into a parasailing harness.

Years later, unearthing the photographs from this fateful day, I will notice for the first time a word imprinted on the parachute that lifted my body to the heavens. The parachute that got caught on a floodlight. The parachute that was no longer there when I fell dozens of feet onto the sand and fractured my coccyx. The word, appearing backwards in the image, reads: “Estrella.” I am a shooting star crashing to earth while my second family, frozen, watches in horror.

Days later, my stateside orthopedic surgeon will pronounce, “If you’d landed differently on your legs, you would be paralyzed. If you’d landed on your head, you would be dead.”

As I wait another hour to hear if my margins are clear, I am one of the only people left in the waiting room once filled with patients decades older than me. I want my margins to be clear, but they arenot. Not yet.

Click. I am sixteen, hair wet, eyes red, surrounded by soccer teammates on a school bus. That girl, ensconced in an orange and blue windbreaker, doesn’t know that in a matter of weeks her friend will be dead and she will tear her ACL the same day as his funeral. She doesn’t know that three months after that, her replacement ligament will snap like a rubber band while at a dance.

Sidelined from sports, she will throw herself into photography, spending countless hours under the crimson glow of the safelight, a red star designed to leave no trace. In the darkroom, she will use an enlarger to project negatives onto the surface of photo-sensitive paper with light designed to leave a trace as it converts black to white and white to black.

On its way to becoming a photographic print, an image passes through three lenses: the photographer’s, the camera’s, the enlarger’s. The final image is the result of countless adjustments in apertures, in chemical ablutions, in the inclusion or exclusion of filters, like transparent map overlays.

To produce enough detail in the darkest and lightest parts of a black and white image, that girl will dodge and burn the enlarger’s light just as she will dodge her way through the rest of high school, camouflaging the parts of her necessary to move through both light and dark spaces. She will become an expert at masking, turning inward to imagine new histories through the narratives constructed by writing with light.

Historically, the idea of adoption, especially trans-racial, trans-cultural, trans-national adoption, has been likened to the concept of a tabula rasa. As if a child taken from their first family is born anew when placed in a second one. Or third or fourth. As if a child is a piece of blank photographic paper, awaiting a new story to be written on their surface.

But that’s impossible. We are not born blank slates. Baptizing me in the white hot spring of adoption did not erase the past from my body, from this vessel that was treated as a commodity.

The surgeon scrapes a third layer and I sink deeper into myself, meditating on my desire to be darker. To appear on the outside how I feel on the inside. I feel most like myself when I am “tan,” when I look to others like I can claim roots closer to the equator. When I look even less like the vanilla hues of my second family.

Click. I am thirty-two years old. My husband wraps an arm around me as we stand next to a colorful map of Ecuador. We smile as I point to Santa Elena Province, our future home. Days later, at the monument to the equator, I will stand with one foot in the northern hemisphere and one foot in the southern.

By my second year in-country, I will feel at ease in my sun-kissed skin strolling down the beach to work with a youth foundation, the Pacific Ocean raging by my side. I will feel confident commuting on a bus for weekly meetings with a women’s artisan cooperative down the coast. I will bask in the warmth of the group’s affection. A group filled with women digging their way out of the trenches of their circumstances. Women whom a different version of me might have called Mamá, tía, or prima.

In Ecuador, I passed for Latinx. The question I was asked most frequently was not if I had Latin American roots but which ones. Listeners tried to place my Spanish accent and vocabulary—a mix of all the places I have volunteered, studied, and lived—with a decidedly Colombian foundation. I speak like a newscaster in both English and Spanish.

In the US, I pass for various flavors of white. During the unprovoked “What are you?” guessing game, I’ve gotten: Russian, Italian, Greek, and Spanish; as well as Native American, Argentinian, Chilean, and Colombian. I’ve never done a DNA test, so who can say they aren’t all correct? The roots of me might be all over the map, but undoubtedly, colonization is written in my blood.

At last, the surgeon says my margins are clear. He hands me a mirror. The wound on my nose is a 2.5-centimeter-long elliptical island with blood red borders filled with lava. It takes nineteen stitches to close it. I am a pin cushion. The surgeon embroiders me as he talks about sports and the weather with the medical assistant. I smell my burning flesh as he uses a soldering iron to staunch the bleeding.

At home, I spend three full days in bed, encased in bloody bandages, hiding my zippered face from my young children. My husband leaves me trays of food. The smallest sliver of light blinds me. I drown in migraines, a mask over my eyes. Unable to look at a screen for long, I return to my audiobook, undulating in and out of consciousness, waves of coherence lapping against a distant shore.

I take selfies to document the slow passage of healing and wonder which version of me will survive this ordeal. It has been said that a woman contains two selves. One who walks into a room. The other who watches her walk into a room. It is true, I am both the walker and the watcher. The model and the photographer. However, as an adoptee, I carry not two selves, but four. At once, I am the woman walking down the street on the east coast of North America, and I am also the woman walking down a parallel street on the west coast of South America. She, my third self, is the grown-up ghost of the girl who was never adopted. She, who was never uprooted, never renamed. My mirror-twin, flickering just out of reach.

We exist side-by-side, slightly askew—like the View-Master reel, two images merging into a single, three-dimensional truth. What scars does my mirror-twin bear? Does she have cancer? Is she alive today? And my fourth self, not another faceless public but my faceless first family. Ever present. Always watching. If they could see this ghostly version of me, would they claim me as their kin?

Before having skin cancer, I was whitest during New England winters. Living in a colder part of the world, thousands of miles from my country of origin, bleached me. It hid the darker ancestors winking through history on the surface of my skin. As if by being given to the light I had also been subsumed by it. Out of my first mother’s, first motherland’s, first mother tongue’s shadow, I emerged to disappear into milky oblivion. As many privileges as my white skin affords me, I lost something in this deal with the devil. A deal I never consented to yet benefit from.

I have counted down from one hundred by sevens multiple times waiting for the anesthesia to pull me under. Before my first ACL surgery, my anxiety told me horror stories of waking up in the middle of the operation, feeling the sharp sensation of each incision. From experience, I know healing is the most painful part. As your skin bridges canyons, as your knee absorbs the foreign ligament, as the stitches dissolve, it hurts.

Weeks after the Mohs procedure, I return to the clinic to have the stitches removed. I want to feel relief but I do not. I have been the unwitting recipient of a nose job. To me, the foremost scholar of my own face, I am a stranger. Although I do not recognize this new patchwork surface just yet, this latest rupture has unearthed unknown depths.

My fault lines realign. Past pain composts for future use. In my transplanted ecosystem, I discover, nothing is wasted.

I carry the pain and the purpose of my ancestors. They are in my bones and in my blood. I carry generations in need of healing. They are in my rolling eyes, rolling hips, and rolling tongue. I carry their joys and their generosity. They point my internal compass home, where I can find rest and comfort in the soil and the shade. Nothing can ever erase that.

As long as I stay out of the sun, the surgeon says, the mark across my nose will fade until I barely notice the treacherous mountain path. Like Icarus, I have learned my lesson. Piously, I rub SPF 50 onto my skin multiple times a day until no white film remains. Outdoors, I wear hats and sunglasses. In this sense only, I am doomed to live as a paler version of myself.

The surgeon was wrong. Over a year later, a noticeable scar remains but it has become a part of me like ruins reclaimed by earth. Finally, I appear on the outside how I feel on the inside. Once wounded, now healed.