I'm Starly, an Alienesque lady, artist and electronic musician based in North Carolina, USA.
I arrived on Earth in the year 199X, traveling from a faraway world of multicolored lizards fairly similar to the chameleon.
Some time while I was on this planet, I had an encounter with a Dancing Flower. It joined me on my initial travel here as a seed, perhaps falling into my belongings at an interplanetary rest stop. Very recently, I stumbled upon it in an old backpack and nearly mistook it for a broken piece of pencil lead, only with a legume-y texture.
What the...? How long had it been there? Was it still alive?
I began to feel some sympathy for its well-being. This thing could be a living entity trapped in stasis, struggling for its first breath. I placed it in a small flower pot and watered it over several weeks, gave it sunlight and love (and I played the sapling plenty of Plantasia by Mort Garson).
Before long, a young eyeball with sunflower petals for lashes blossomed in front of me. It sprang from the soil and drifted into my hand, like seedy remnants of a dandelion in the wind, placing itself in between my fingers.
This plant-like creature danced and swayed and it looked right at me with a singular, captivated-staring iris. It didn't appear hostile; rather, it was beaming with a twinkling smile encompassed in its eye... if eyeball flowers could smile.
Then without so much as a greeting, it communicated some message by telepathy. I hadn't heard that dialect in a while. A mantra, voiced in some foreign language I couldn't understand. It was not even human, for it was not audibly spoken.
The closest translation I can give is, "Follow the Streams."The Flower made me see visions... Or maybe they were hallucinations. Whatever they were, they were intense and all-encompassing, and they made my soul feel like one giant wavering soup. Hot, then cold, then on the verge of evaporating away to the forces of motion. Gravity, inertia, everything.
I was going to die from the inside-out. If I didn't die, my mind would surely be ripped apart—a byproduct of the sheer existential madness and biological strain they placed on my vital organs. It took a technique from my space-lizard ancestors to keep me from going insane. Using what I was taught, I shed my skin. With help from the Flower, and its extrasensory abilities, the memories from that body were tucked away, deep inside my brain and my immediate awareness.
If I seem different, the version of Starly you see today is not the one from years ago, but a Starly re-envisioned by circumstance. Alternatively, it could be fate. I don't know for sure.