Embracing the Absence


WORDS AND IMAGERY / SOPHIE HOWE

JULY 01, 2023 / 002

“I was born with a bright red mark on the right side of my face near my ear. It was a vascular malformation called a haemangioma that shrunk in my first few weeks of life and swelled again as I got older. It was a tumour dotted with superficial blood vessels, anomalous but not cancerous. It didn’t cause uncontrollable bleeding or affect my hearing. As it grew, it made my tiny head flop to the side.”

It brought me closer to the baby my parents had who died when he was a year old. I only ever saw him through photographs. He had a tiny haemangioma on his chin, evidence that the mark wasn’t my fault but the combination of my parent’s genetic makeup. My brother’s was smaller but in a prominent part of his face, a spot that had he been able to grow older, could never have hidden. I wished we could have shared the embarrassment and confusion, navigated the gawking eyes of curious children together. 

When I was 9 at a friend’s birthday party, I was accidentally kicked in the head. A girl’s sweaty bare foot grazed my birthmark and her toes scratched my ear. The feeling was muted, like my synapses were delaying the recognition of pain. Normally this part of my body was only touched by me, stretching and poking, wondering what it would look and feel like if it was normal skin. Later it was touched by doctors, their lasers, scalpels, gloved hands adding stitches, removing them later as I squirmed on a crinkly sheet.

Growing up in Massachusetts, I worried that had I been born during the Salem Witch Trials I would have been burnt at the stake. It sounds dramatic, but I think it stemmed from a feeling of no matter where I was in history, even in ghost stories and children’s books, I would be singled out as preternatural. Most nights I would pray for facial symmetry, little hands clasped under my sheets feeling like a freak. When I was 12, I spoke to random people on messaging apps, sending them pictures of my post-surgery skin begging for the validation of normalcy from middle aged men. Once I outgrew my fear of the witch trials, I thought instead about sex. I knew that one day when I slept with somebody, I’d have to lie down with my hair brushed away from my irregular face. I thought about this obsessively, especially after a girl I liked saw my cheek a few days after  surgery and pretended to vomit, another classmate beside her joining in.

The zapping lasers that removed the colour from the tumour is like the pain of getting a tattoo. It’s loud and kinetic like a rubber band repeatedly smacking you. After each laser session, I was shrouded with a sheet of clingfilm and a bandage. When I took the wrapping off, my skin was black and blue and it shone with petroleum jelly. I felt like a mutant, a fish-girl, an alien. I was fascinated, I was horrified. I threw up something red from the shock and thought it was blood but I must have eaten strawberries. I was nauseous from pain meds, the recovery days were liminal and I felt like a creature from a horror movie.

Now that the birthmark is gone, I miss it. I reach towards my face, grab for what was once there. Old friends tell me it’s not noticeable anymore, the scar is faint and tucked away. I know the skin will never be fully smooth, the terrain will always be rough and covered in a layer of protective hair. I can’t find an image on the internet that looks exactly like my birthmark, so I’ve asked my mother to send me baby pictures where the tumour is visible. She says she’s not sure she has any. Because I was so young when I had these surgeries, I’ve had to research the medical terminology to be sure I’m retelling it correctly. The language I’ve found to describe haemangiomas has been so beautiful (a proliferation, an involution, a capillary, cavernous: embedded in the skin’s deep layers) and the words I’ve thought of myself to describe something that was once so grotesque to me have been gentle and neutral: a purple coalescence, an amalgamation.

I like to think that if I could do it all again I would chose to not have any surgery, that I would be brave enough to reject the doctor’s suggestions. I feel grateful that I had the financial support of my parents, and access to good medical care, but I feel like a fraud. The many rounds of liposuction I underwent to remove the extra fatty tissue were for purely aesthetic purposes. As I child I was made to feel I needed to endure physical pain and discomfort to look conventional. My formative understanding of myself was that I was ugly, weird, maybe even frightening to look at.

I don’t think I can rid myself of that classification, and it wouldn’t feel fair to. As I’ve gotten older and connected the sensation of surgical lasers to tattoo guns, I’ve thought of Kathy Acker’s written explorations of body modifications, tattoos, piercings, and weight lifting. How she saw these acts as expansive; a way for women to rebel. I find comfort in this, and I see the paradox: the way that I could have rebelled would have been to not alter my face. In queer circles, and in parts of the art world, nonconformity is a social currency. These spaces have allowed me a very recent freedom to be gentle with myself, the child who felt like a monster, and the adult who wants her extra blood vessels back.


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