Catharsis~ @1017thebeach - Tumblr Blog

My Hair

My hair curls and twirls,

frizzy, to below the midpoint of my back,

its golden tendrils beaming in the sunlight.

I can’t help but feel it’s backhanded

when Mom says how beautiful it’d be short.

Its wayward ways are unbecoming

of a young professional like myself,

But each year, I can only bear to take a little.

How could I take more,

When every lock that drops to the salon floor–

Swept away carelessly by a moody assistant,

Is a piece of me unbecoming?

She is young, skinny, beautiful and innocent.

She is the lucky me

who fell in love for the first time under the stars

at Shinnecock Inlet.

She is the adventurous me,

frolicking drunk home from a frat at Cornell,

following the lights of the Johnson museum.

She is the deeply caring me

who met an angelic friend at college,

not yet knowing how soon she’d be taken away.

She is the hopeful me who moved across the country

with my old friends and my new boyfriend.

And even though that first love is married now,

To someone who is not me,

And I live three thousand miles from Ithaca,

And I’ve knelt by my friend’s grave twice since she passed–

The versions of me that came before

the one I see in the mirror today

Cannot be swept away.

Catharsis~