Brown

This is: unprecedented.
It is also: endlessly fascinating.
It is: fate and Guatemala.

It started a few weeks ago,
on a regular day.  I left one morning,
I came back changed.

The change was visible
on the skin: the day had written
itself across my flesh, sparkling
along in a sun-kissed radiance
that emanated right back out.

A light, healthy-colored yellow,
brightened to a warmer gold,
and as the days went on, it was
a process of becoming well-done,
of accepting this as natural,
of becoming something that I had
never been before.

I am now fully and incontestably: brown.