Albino
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

People stare. You just have to get used to it. My mother told me that there was albinism in our family. Others had learned to live with. In particular, the women in our family seemed to have it easy. Blond hair and pale almost hairless skin – they could paint on their eyebrows and darken their eyelashes to look normal. As a boy that was never an option for me.

I grew my hair long to try to hide behind it. It was almost white so it drew some attention by itself, but somehow, I could retreat behind a veil of hair.

I thought about going goth – you know the thing – dye my hair black and wear makeup. Sure you are not hiding – you are doing the opposite in drawing attention to yourself – but at least you are a freak by choice.

Maybe I could have bought the hair dye and done it in the sink, but instead I decided to go to the local salon. To my surprise one of the stylists was albino. This was crazy as the incidence in the European population in the States is 1 in 20,000 and I knew 6 from my own family so the odds seemed crazy.

She seemed to relish her albinism. She had long curly hair but pulled back from her face which was only lightly daubed with color if any at all. The result was striking, and beautiful.

“I know exactly what you are going through,” she said. “But going dark is not the answer. You have such wonderful hair – thicker than many like us. Will you let me do something with it to bring out a version of you that you will be proud to present to the world?”

I had not been convinced that the goth thing would help, but I was ready to give it a try. Now she was offering to do something else. She asked me to take off my shirt, in private because my skin was so white it was an embarrassment. For some reason she wanted me to wear a smock of some kind while she set to work on my hair.

I have thought since whether there was something in the solutions she put on my face and in my hair, or whether it was the pungent scents in the salon that played with my mind, or if I was just so keen to find a way out of my impending depression that I was ready to walk through any open door. Anyway, that door opened.

She took a photo of me in the moment that she spun me around to see myself in the mirror. It was just a hairstyle, but it had a huge impact. She had done hardly anything to my face, except a good clean and the removal of dirt and whiskers. It was the hair that showed me that I could be somebody else. I could be like her. A stunning blonde – a natural blonde.

It is a start, but it has shown me that I might just be able to find a way in the world for myself, as an albino, and now as a woman.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2023