Chapter Thirty-Three #3
Lifting the scissors, I close my eyes and take a big breath. Fresh tears slide down my face and drop to the floor next to my feet. I’m so tired of crying. It’s all I seem to do lately. It takes some effort to cut through and I saw at it for a long time until I finally free myself.
Sucking in desperate breaths of freedom, I shake out the shaggy black hair dangling in front of my face.
Now that I’m upright again, I use my full body weight on the lock. It takes effort to work the severed hank of hair out. But, finally, I free it. Clinging to the hunk of hair, I jerk open the locker door and stare at myself in the mirror hanging inside.
I feel dizzy with sadness.
I’ve always loved my hair. I think it’s beautiful. So does Dan.
But it’s always been a lot to handle. It gets everywhere. It comes off in the shower, jams up the vacuum cleaner, and it’s so fucking thick it takes forever to dry. It’s time consuming and impossible. It’s in my way all the time . It gets in my face. And I can’t deal with it lately. Not anymore.
I take up another thick coil, and my hand trembles as I cut it off too.
Then another.
And another.
When I’m done, my gorgeous long black hair is piled around my shoes. I stare down at it, and then back into the mirror. I’m unsure of the man I see there.
All I know is he looks nothing like me.
*
Dan
I’ve never been so bored in all my life.
Rye and Lowell have both come and gone hours ago, leaving me in my bed with a piss bottle if I desperately need to go, and nothing to do with my time.
Since they left, I’ve masturbated until I can’t see straight, I’ve read over every journal I’ve ever written, reviewed every climb I’ve ever made, and caught up on all the spraying from the climbing community.
In recent days, I’ve been left here alone so often that I’ve even made friends with the cats. They think I’m their very own personal heater and sleep on me whenever they can. I never thought I’d be covered in cats and not hate it. But it turns out maybe they’re kind of sweet.
The days when I have to go to Fresno for tests or to the dentist to get my teeth taken care of are horrific. Getting out and about is agonizing. But those are still better days than this. Turns out I’ll take pain over boredom anytime.
So here I am, laid out on the bed, gazing at the view of the foggy lawn out the window and nearly suffocated by Romeo’s butt, when Sejin comes home.
My heart starts to thrum, and I feel a smile come over my face.
He’s here. He’s finally here. As he comes through the bedroom door, my breath is knocked out of my lungs by the sight of him.
Pushing Romeo off, I struggle to a fully seated position. “What the hell did you do to your hair?”
“I cut it.” He pauses in the doorway, the light from the window shining on his tense face.
“You cut it,” I repeat in disbelief.
“With scissors,” he adds unnecessarily, his shoulders almost touching his now very visible ears. They’re pretty like the rest of him and not excessively large or weirdly shaped. Thank God, since apparently I’ll be seeing a lot of them. “Then I went to have the barber shape it up.”
“You cut it yourself?”
“It’s been a bad day,” Sejin says, wiping his hand across his face, and it seems to all come tumbling out of him without even a breath between sentences.
“I didn’t have time to dry it this morning, so it was wet all day.
And then the new little guy? Byron? He vomited on me and it got in my hair, and I threw up too, and it was all—” He waves his hands around.
“I washed it out in the sink with hand soap that smelled like cinnamon apples—”
“Gross.”
“Yeah, and when I got to Papa Bear, my fucking hair got caught in my locker door, and I lost it. Celli gave me some scissors and—” He mimes cutting his hair.
“Gone. Boom. But then it looked like shit, all choppy and horrible, and, and…” His eyes well with tears.
“I started crying”—he waves at his own face—“like now, and Pete was all, ‘Just leave, kid, Jesus’ and I was really in no place to argue with him about it, even though we need the money. Like a lot. So, I went to the closest barber, and he made it nice.”
Sejin lifts his hand, the one that’s been behind his back, and a long black ponytail waves in the air.
Romeo jumps up and bats at it. Sejin lifts it higher.
“Celli collected it all and made me take it with me. The barber tied it up for me.” Wiping at his wet face with the back of his hand, Sejin whispers, “I can’t believe I did it.
What was I thinking? I’ve always had long hair. Since I was a kid.”
I swallow down my own visceral reaction to the loss of all that black silk and reach out to him instead.
As he comes forward, and sits on the bed next to me, I touch the buzzed undercut beneath the almost chin-length longer parts.
Turns out I like the sensation of its softness against my fingers. “You look great.”
“Do I?” He tugs back from my touch, running his hand through his hair and over his head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter really. I needed it gone.”
“Why?”
“I can’t do it all ,” Sejin cries. And then, as if he’s heard himself too clearly, he casts his gaze down to the floor where Muggs and Julio are trying to bat at the length of his cut-off hair again.
It dangles loosely in his grasp, hanging over the side of the bed.
His voice is quiet when he speaks again.
“I don’t have the time or the energy to keep up with it anymore while I’m holding down two jobs, trying to care for Peggy Jo’s little monsters here, and helping you—” He holds out a hand. “Don’t! Don’t apologize!”
I blink. “I wasn’t going to.”
“—because I want to help you.” Sejin pauses and tilts his head. “You weren’t?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
I shrug. “I mean… I didn’t make you cut your hair.”
“No, but—” Sejin’s jaw tightens. “You don’t see how this situation contributed to me doing it?”
“Yes? But I wasn’t going to apologize. Even though I am sorry.”
His mouth goes hard.
“I can apologize if you want me to.” I take a breath and say seriously, “I’m sorry you cut your hair.”
“No, I don’t want you to be sorry I cut my hair!” Sejin exclaims, shaking the ponytail at me. “I want you to be sorry I’m so overwhelmed. Because I wouldn’t be if…if…” He trails off.
“If I’d died?”
“No!” His eyes fly wide.
“If you’d left me?”
“No! For fuck’s sake, don’t be an asshole. If you’d never tried that damn climb.”
“Mm.” There we go. More of that anger he’s got locked inside. He told me at the start it was fair for him to have it, and it is, but he also told me life isn’t fair, so…
Whitman said we contain multitudes. Sejin is a prime example.
He sits quietly for a long moment before he whispers, “But I don’t think I’d want you to be a Dan who doesn’t climb.”
“Climb or free solo?”
“Either. Both. This Dan—the one I’ve been living with the last few weeks—he’s heartbreaking.
I miss the guy who’s always moving, always ready to prove to me he has it under control, even when I’m scared he doesn’t.
And I know that guy’s still in there, but…
right now I’m so confused.” Sejin covers his face. “Oh, God, I cut my hair.”
I pull him down onto the bed beside me, heedless of my journals and my notes and the used tissues that I should have tossed into the trash but haven’t had the energy to dispose of, and I rub my fingers over his new, short hair. “I’m going to get better.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to climb again.”
“I know that too.”
“And if you want, if you insist , I can free solo again.”
Sejin huffs a laugh. “You’re such a dick.”
I shrug.
“I do want you to climb,” Sejin murmurs. “I want you to be the guy I met and fell in love with.”
“The guy who climbs up El Cap without ropes,” I remind him.
“If it means you’ll be Dan again, then I’ll be right there behind you while you free solo, cheering you on.”
“Please don’t. That’d be way too distracting. I’d probably fall.”
Sejin laughs again. “I hate you.”
“Do you?”
“Sometimes. But I also love you, and I know the person I fell for is a man who has radical goals he isn’t willing to walk away from just because they’re scary, or hard, or his lover doesn’t understand them—”
“Boyfriend…” I correct. I still don’t get the appeal of the word lover. It’s so French, and I’m many things, but none of them are French.
“Boyfriend. I’ll never understand why you have to go up against the wall the way you do—”
It’s only now that I have no choice but to deal with all the relentless memories that I’m starting to understand why climbing took on such a big role in my life. If I’m on the wall, I can’t be stuck in the past. It’s only and always the here and now when I’m up there.
“—but I also know I’ll never love anyone the way I love you, Dan. And the you I love is a free soloist.”
I know there’s more to his stress than my frustration at being stuck in bed.
I know it’s bills, and working two jobs, and caring for me and the cats.
I know it’s the dwindling money in our bank accounts.
But I can’t make promises about any of that.
I’m worried about those things too. So, instead, I tell him about something else.
Something I’ve never shared with anyone before.
“Have I ever told you about when I was a kid?”
“Only that you were passed around a lot, and that you didn’t feel loved.”
“Right. Part of what’s going on in my head lately,” I say carefully, “comes from that.”
Sejin sits up enough to look me in the eye. “Do you want to tell me? I’d like to know.”