Monday, May 1
Now
I repeat my mantra, out loud, to steady myself.
Deep breath.
“I am no one.”
I lift the scissors and bury them into my hair.
Wild and recklessly curly. An implacable shade of light brown or perhaps dark, wooden blond. Wonderful and strange. When I was a baby, people would stop my mom and ask, Did she come out like that? My ever-growing mass of tightly wound corkscrew curls told the world: she is someone.
My hair has been deceiving me for years. Like most beautiful things, people, and places, it is a mirage.
But not anymore.
Now, it’s coating my bathroom sink. Mucking up the plumbing. Twenty years from now someone’s boyfriend will snake this drain and gag at the moldy, ancient clump that’s choked back up.
What the fuck happened? they’ll wonder.
I stare at my partially sheared head. A golden dust covers my cheekbones and the curve of my top lip. I didn’t have a razor strong enough to survive the task of making me feel alive, so kitchen scissors had to do.
But, you see, I’ve encountered a real problem.
I can’t reach the back of my head.
And, out of a real fear of being hog-tied and tossed away into a padded room, I, in a moment of true lucidity, know I cannot phone a friend.
Instead, I head out into the world with one-quarter of my hair still attached to my head. It hangs out of the back of my baseball cap like a beaver tail.
The hair salon I go into, at random, is staffed by a bunch of young, tattooed women also wearing hats. They stare on in horror.
The hairdresser does her best, God bless her.
She smooths and styles my now pixie-cut curls with mousse and high spirits.
“Oh my God. Babe, you look like Drew Barrymore.”
I blink back a single, fat tear.
She is lying. I look like John C. Reilly.