Short Hair

She loved her lips, the soft curve up and sharp curve down, coming together to form a cupid’s bow.

Her lips were a good thing, and she was grateful.

Her eyes were a good thing too.

She had loved her eyes since the first time she was loved because of them.

“Your eyes,” a lover had said. “They shine like Gold!”

The girl had blinked, confused, but her lover interpreted it as flirtation and had leaned in for a kiss.

“They are?” she’d asked, breaking away from his lips

“They are,” the lover said, replacing his mouth over her air.

The lover looked at her, and she thought she could see herself. For the first time, she saw her eyes, and saw how they could be sexual, valuable.

The hair came next.

Her hair was long, brown, heavy. Falling down her back.

As a kid, her only friends were kitchen scissors.

She'd spend hours creating designs out of the heavy sheets of her hair.

The designs made her mother cry huge, ugly tears that turned her ugly and angry.

"What have you done to your beautiful body?" her voice would yell, disembodied and too large.

"I made it me." she'd whisper.

Nights keep happening, and soon the girl is old enough to be called a woman, old enough to date.

While her hair grew she would date many men and long for many women. She poured herself into each relationship. She felt poured out when it ended.

She didn't know why the relationships went away so soon, but she knew she couldn't love them or need them or see them in the way they needed her to be.

“Love me!” said each lover.

“I can’t!” she said back.

The lovers would leave and she would walk in front of the mirror with level eyes, the kitchen scissors never leaving her side until she looked different, until she looked better, until her hair was shorter.

Sometimes her nights would take her to bars. Alone, in dark hallways, she would meet women who looked like women she could love if she could love herself.

"You are beautiful" the women say

"Could you love me?" she always wants to know

"I can't love you hun, that's nothing you've ever known."

She would laugh and blush, and they would laugh too — their infectious laughter chewing her up, spitting her out onto the cold floor.

On these nights, she spins out until she spins out of the bar. The alley ways eat her up, and she becomes a ghost. Haunted, taunted.

Someone who might have known her may have said that her memories were too heavy to bear. Too hard to wear, down her back.

"That wasn't just hair! What she had was power!"

But the woman is a banshee, and her screams

“Let me go!” when there is nothing but a light floral blanket keeping her safe from the cold.

“Let me go,” she yells while holding her head in anguish in an attempt to stop the remembering of the movies that press up against her skull.

snip. snip. snip. her scissors get to work. She snips off her ends, off her middles, and off her beginnings. She snips off her memories, and all the bad and messed up beginnings.

Her hair is short now, shorter than ever before, and the memories have no place to go. The crazy is starting to show up in her eyes now, everyone can see. And without her hair there's also bruises and cuts visible, from self-harm to me.

She was proud of the crazy, the pain, and the ruin too. It became her favorite feature too.

“Do you like my favorite feature?” she asked me, her lover, showing me her black, red, and blue.

"No" I said and watched as she put more love onto her body with a shoe.

She's smiling now, somewhere, in a folding chair with a magazine on her lap. There's a cigarette in her hands and a slight crease on her forehead. She is not a little girl anymore.

There's a tile in her head, and a smile on her lips, and I'm certain her hair is much shorter.

The scissors are away. There is no sign of fray.

She is allowed to feel peace and be happy.