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Let me tell you a story. It is, in some ways, a story of bravery. It is also in many ways a story of tragedy, of pointless and irrevocable loss. And above all else, it is a story of hair. My hair, to be more precise and still a little vague. :)

It all started, more or less, Friday. I mean, it really had started long before that, because I’ve had hair for quite some time now. As long as I can remember, really, and likely even longer than that. I have thick, dark, curly, generally unmanageable hair. Which meant, once I’d gathered the strength and endurance to grow it out long, it stayed thick, dark, curly and unmanageable, but all of that somehow worked together to look pretty damn good grown out (if I do say so myself (and I do)).

But anyway, back to Friday. I made a decision Friday. I decided that I needed a haircut. Well, I guess I made that decision quite a while before Friday. I’d really been thinking it since before our camping trip last week, as well. I even mentioned it to a few people, such as my mom, in hopes that she might cut it for me. She’s trained in all those fancy-schmancy hair-cutting arts, you know.

But anyway! Friday, I decided that I was going to get it cut that weekend, and that I wasn’t going to bother my mom about it. She hasn’t been feeling the best lately, and I didn’t see any reason to make her stand on her feet for any longer than her job made necessary, so I decided to bite the bullet and pay for a trim.

Next time, I’ll know to check for live munitions before I bite down. :)

A trim is really all I needed. My hair had grown a bit too long for my tastes as of late, as you can see in this picture here, taken on the trip home from visiting M’ris:

Hair-Raising I (Click for New Window)

Although you can’t see it in that picture, I was starting to get a halo effect from all the smaller hairs floating about my head, which didn’t look particularly nice. And, as you CAN see, my hair was past my shoulders, so it was starting to feel like a nuisance. I could new and interesting things with it, like lean against a wall and pin my head to the wall with my hair, or get hair in my mouth when I was taking a shower.

So, I went through all the old images I had of myself, looking for a length of hair that I’d particularly liked. I settled on the length seen here, taken at the very end of April (as part of a mirror project submission):

Hair-Raising II (Click for New Window)

At that lengh, my hair looked nice, took care of itself, and didn’t get in my way. It was perfect. So, I printed off that very same image and took it with me to Great Clips. I figured, it couldn’t get any easier than I was making it for the stylist: I wasn’t asking her to make me look like some random movie or music star, I was asking her to make me look like me.

“This is me,” I said, holding the picture up to the hair stylist (if that ~is~ her real title). “This is what I looked like a couple of months ago. I want to look like me again. A couple of inches is all it should take.” She nodded her head.

Silly me, I assumed she was nodding her head in understanding. Now, of course, I understand that she was nodding to the quiet little voices inside her head. You know the ones. They’re the ones who say things like, “Your mother never loved you when you were little,” or “They’re all laughing at you! Are you really just going to stand there with that crowbar and take it from them?,” or “Burn them! Burn them all!” You know the voices, right?

Anyway. She wasn’t nodding in understanding. No way. Couldn’t have been. Because, take a look first at the picture I gave her (the one above), and then, if you’re brave, or if your eyes have already wandered too far, take a look at this picture here:

Hair-Raising III (Click for New Window)

This is what she did to me based on my instructions. Compare the two. Aside from the glasses and the perpetual shadow of facial hair, do you see much in common between the two? Maybe I should have taken off my glasses when she was cutting my hair, to force her to try harder for a match. I asked for two inches off. She took closer to six.

I was a little bit devastated. I’d never understood girls before when they got emotional over haircuts. It’s just hair, right? Of course, I’d never before lost six inches of hair, which had taken me six months to grow, at once. It’s frighteningly traumatic. And also a tad dangerous. When I got out of the shower for the first time (washing the tiny shorn hairs out of the slightly longer hairs, you know), I nearly sprained my neck trying to flick several pounds of wet hair out of my face that wasn’t there anymore. The motion, it seems, had become automatic. :)

What was I to do? My hair was gone! So, I did the only thing I could think of (with a little help from Megan): I made what little hair I had left a bit more interesting to look at.

I’ve only dyed my hair once before this, and that was during some autumn or another when I dyed my hair a few shades darker to compensate for the bleaching the sun had given it the summer before. This time, I decided to go lighter. Quite a bit lighter, actually.

Hair-Raising IV (Click for New Window)

As you can see, Megan and I took a bottle of blond dye (the good, strong stuff), and bleached sections of my hair an interesting shade of blond. No, I don’t like it nearly as much as I liked my hair 48 hours ago. If I had the choice, I’d have my old hair back. But I don’t have that choice, so I might as well have a bit of fun with what hair I’ve got.

Comments? *grin*