emma b. says

Monday, May 17, 2010

A Year Without a Haircut

Oh hey.

Funny how you can go from January to May without a good blood letting.

It was April of last year, I had gone to J's house, after she'd flaked on me a couple of times, she'd left her salon, and her kitchen made me a little sad and her boyfriend was a little creepy, it was way the fuck out there in North Portland, six weeks later I forgot to book and appointment. Then another six weeks, and then it was high summer and I took to going to the pool in the park with E and massaging lemon juice through my hair. It was growing anyway.

Then it was Fall and the full reckoning of poverty broke upon my resigned shore. And kept breaking, straight through Winter, and then the year turned, and I thought, well I thought, I'd have a little sociological experiment with myself. A year without a haircut.

A little back story to compile for empircal evidence. Once upon a time when I was twenty-three, I cut off my waist length hair to pose as an adult, and since then I have gone every eight weeks for a cut and color. I have been pixie short and platnum blonde, I have been a fierce bobbed red head, I have had a hairdresser who was fucking my husband, I had fabulous A for a long time who went to my highschool, I had the French boyfriend who turned me strawberry without my permission, then another A, close friend and much missed, sweet respite in Sausalito, thumbing through magazines and shooting the breeze with the curious mix of socialites and peers, the bay in my nose, Smitty's across the street.

I am blessed to grow stupid hair. I have hair that cascades, I have fairy tale hair. I am two days shy of thirty-nine years old and I still can't find any gray hair. A year without a haircut and I am just as blonde as I ever was with these stupid curls, I wear it down and it's like catnip for men. All they see is hair and tits. (oh and oh, all those thousands of dollars)

You might as well ask, why haven't you shorn your locks if you resent them so, the secret is, after I cut my hair the first time, I used to dream about it. There is nothing better then pinning your hair up with a pencil, there is nothing better then twisting and twirling, the twining through of fingers. Even though it's hot and heavy, and most of the time it feels like a dirty cape, or half of a hair shirt, it's the first time in nearly twenty years that it falls between my shoulder blades. Maybe I am just reaching back to when the world seemed so wide open, so full of promise, when the day that I might turn thirty-nine seemed forever away and now here it is and I would like to bleed out in the bath tub, save the bright star of hope and the horror it would cause my family. That and three years of growing out this hair.

Besides the grand show is half over anyway, might as well see it through, that's a novel thought, mortality, never thought about that, don't really want to, let's talk about my hair.

Because it's a much happier subject than the Portland Project, two years, seven months, a veritable mixed bag of results. Or a braid, one part providence to one part disappointment and one part sorry timing, then all the stray wisps, of self loathing and all that weight that snuck up on you when you were worrying about all the other shit that wasn't getting done, the tendrils of love that got snapped off in a dry climate, or when you decided that you simply were not worth loving, not sure when that particular bane rooted to the follicles at your nape, but there they propogate as itchy as lice and harder to poison.

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