it starts when your girlfriend innocently pinches a lock of your hair in her fingers and says, it’s getting long, babe, and you say, oh, it is, huh, i should really get it cut, like you didn’t notice. she just shrugs and curls it around her finger, and her pink nail polish revealed from beneath the swirl of it fixes your eye while she says, i don’t know. i think it looks good.
it started before you can remember, your father and his big metal monster clippers cropping feathers off your head. so little, still eggshell, hummingbird heart, sometimes you’d cry at the sound of them, and he would pretend not to notice. he would hold you by the face, tiny chin made smaller in his huge hands. he would tilt you, gentler than it looked, and shear you like a prized sheep. all done, he’d tell you, ruffle your head and send scraps flying. then you’d lean under the showerhead and wash it all free. the water always felt colder, more clean. your shoulders trembled.
it starts when your girlfriend takes you into the bathroom and guides warm water gently onto your scalp. she works shampoo into your hair. you lose track of time under her fingertips, under the gentle press of the soft blue towel. then she sits you up and snips away your dead ends. half an inch, maybe one. the sound of it so delicate, so smooth. snp, snp. a halo behind your back. a flock of black-capped chickadees taking flight out the open window.
it started when your dad, imperious and particular, a king with his goblet, told your brother to get'at damn mop off your head before someone called you a. the clippers turned on before you could hear him tell you what you were. your brother’s hands shook around them, dwarfed in the leering face of the scratched steel, and the buzz was patchy by the end of it, but you don’t really remember that. you remember your brother’s hands on your head, scrubbing thoroughly at it underneath the cold, cold water. you remember he was crying.
it starts in the passenger seat of your best friend’s car. she’s pushing seventy on the highway. there’s someone hooting and cackling behind you, someone cracking a joke that, for the first time, you’re sure isn’t about you. pop music’s blasting on the speakers, but you can’t hear it over the baying call of the wind from your window as you, safe and simple, try to catch it in your palm. acting on impulse, you loosen your seatbelt and come haltingly to a kneel on her soft, gray passenger seat, stick your head out the window and howl.
and it all starts right there, you think. the cold, cold rush of the wind in your hair, in your open eyes, the tiny tears that slip from you, immediately brushed away by the gentle hand of the world.
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