the haircut

If you’ve visited my “about” page, you’ve already been sufficiently warned. Consider this a first dipping of my toe into a very cold and curious ocean. There will be more, muse willing. Have no fear; I’ll continue to promote musicians I like, and to make feeble attempts to keep up with Boston-area bands as well as, inexplicably, those 2,983 miles away from me. But for now…

the haircut

it was startling when i first looked in the mirror. i didn’t recognize myself. some sort of wild animal, crazy, unbalanced, a street urchin, a mad woman running unseeingly through open fields. windswept, unstuck from time. truth be told, that’s how i’d been feeling anyway. but now? as if dried nests of regrets and circular thought processes were chopped free in seconds. it was too quick. should there not have been some sort of prayer; a ritual cleansing before the act?

there are photographs in scrapbooks and on walls throughout my parents’ house of my hair through the years. at age 6 on a telephone with long shirley temple curls; at age 15 in my hippie phase, outdated but earnest, long and scraggly, a leather hat on top. drawings i did myself, always the same, parted in the middle with these horrible waves. not straight, not curly; i never realized how much i hated those wretched waves. they were captured perfectly in my bad drawings.

each a constant plea whenever I would visit: don’t change, stay the same. please, no challenge; please, nothing new. too threatening. what is threatened exactly? an ideal only. femininity? vibrancy? i was never terribly feminine, nor vibrant. reckless, yes. i took chances with some wild experimentation, stepped out to the edge, to the edge of sanity, yet i always came reliably back. though a few times i had deliciously wicked thoughts of – just for the hell of it – suddenly veering my car off the road. a magnetic pull, so strong, to see what would happen. out of spite? never did, though.

the hair was, in recent months, broken and damaged, stubbornly held on to far longer than what made sense. perhaps out of some sense of obligation. of duty. i never could let go. but let go i did (or so i imagined) – of mistakes, destructive thought processes and poor judgment calls. in those strands of a living timeline, i calculated, everything prior to mid-2007. immediately afterward, i felt a pang of regret, a voice not my own, disembodied and evil. but the rueful wailing stopped shortly after, and in its place, liberation. self-determination. or maybe just a mad defiance.