“I can’t even really see you with long hair anymore.”
There’s so much I could tell you about raising your hands to your own head, feeling prickly-soft-smooth-short on the pads of your fingers, and realising that you can now do this whenever you want. When the hairstylist is holding up a mirror for you to check whether the sides are even, when you hold your phone up to your face and press record, when you’re in the shower, when it’s someone else’s hand but you still feel it too, when someone sees you for the first time and you both scream a little with joy, when you’re in class and someone you’ve never spoken to before says hey, your hair looks great by the way.
I’ve never really felt comfortable with being seen. It’s a running joke with friends and on Twitter at this point — we hate being perceived, no one look at me, I would like to never be seen or heard from again, etc. — but I don’t think I’ve ever completely seen myself and understood what it meant, let alone derived any comfort from it. I would wither when I felt grease form on my skin, when people tried to take pictures with me, when someone noticed I had a little something on the edge of my mouth, in my teeth — it felt as though someone had decided to slam different pieces into each other and figured that once they roughly fit with enough pressure, I could be a person.
The point is that when I felt a razor at the back of my neck for the first time, I thought I would be more scared. As a child, I used to think hair grew from its ends, inching outward, longer, longer still, until scissors sliced through. That the scalp was where it all started and stayed, unmoving at some centre. After many haircuts and common sense, I realised that it was the reverse. Yet I still felt as though there was something I would never know about where my hair quite began — it was either at my shoulders, or brushing the nape of my neck. It was always there, and it would mysteriously become more there until I decided I’d had enough, usually about once a year.
One of those times, I decided I wanted it to (mostly) not be there anymore. Truthfully, I decided on the way to the salon, quickly taking screenshots of various people with floppy, small bangs on Pinterest. I looked at them, and then at myself in my front camera, and couldn’t see how one could become the other. Truthfully, even as the hairstylist lifted the sheet off and I leaned closer to the mirror, bits of hair still in my eyes, I couldn’t quite feel what had been done yet. It was after I paid, walked out, and felt air on my neck that it began to hit me. I pulled fingers down through the fringe, through the back, and then through nothing, my fingers floundering for more momentum. Hair grows from the head, and this is where it started.
Things on my mind this week:
Lee Sandlin’s Losing the War, or the lengthy excerpt from it in this anthology. It captures the futility of war in the context of how WWII has been historicised and reported vs. what actually occurred, and blends history, memoir and literary analysis in a truly unique way.
Bong Joon Ho (Bong hive!) talked about the smell of tear gas in this interview and it really struck me.
”Clouds of tear gas were a near-daily presence during Bong’s first two years on campus. ‘It was a very traumatic smell. It’s impossible to describe: nauseating, stinging, hot,’ he says. ‘It’s strange, sometimes I smell it in my dreams. Usually dreams are images, but I sometimes have this sensation of smelling it. It’s really horrible, but I guess that’s the way it would be.’”
070 Shake’s Modus Vivendi. She seems so genuinely cool, and sneaks up some really clever bits of songwriting and sampling on you amidst a Lot of autotune and static, which are also things I love. The Pines and Under the Moon are personal faves.
Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats’ Unlocked. You can literally feel how much fun they were having when they made this. It’s silly, chaotic, and very much slaps. Reminds me of Chester Watson’s Past Cloaks if it was less serious/more unhinged.