“There’s got to be someone we can trust
out here among us.”
-Wallflowers, “Three Marlenas”, as heard at Home Depot today

Yesterday was almost an okay day. I couldn’t tell you why. I guess part of it was that Emily and I weren’t bickering over e-mail as we have been wont to do lately. Today is harder, for reasons again mostly inexplicable, but perhaps in part related to our correspondence. Emily chose today to contact a lot of her friends and a fair number of mine to state in a very detached way that we were “going our separate ways.” It was a hard e-mail to read, mostly because of how emotionally vacant it seemed. It also left out any mention of the guy who’d been the catalyst and centerpiece of the whole question. I know she thinks that this isn’t about the guy, but to tell the entire story without there being another guy just seems to make the whole thing even more cavalier and capricious than it already actually is.

Whatever. Ultimately, everyone tells themselves a story so they can sleep at night. Me, I cut my hair.

It’s a complicated issue, this one of the haircut. Obviously my hair has a lot of symbolic import for me and it was important to mark the occasion of mourning and loss with a physical loss that reflected the kind of sacrifices I’ve been told I have to make against my will. It’s also a little bit about someday being able to attract someone else, getting my hair back to the length that turned the most heads back in late high-school and early college. And more than even being in a position where I might be able to actually attract someone else anytime soon, it’s largely about feeling like I could. I feel so profoundly unlovable right now that any small glimmer of hope or confidence is an incredible boon.

So now my hair looks like this:

Ariel and Michael accompanied me and held my hand (and my hair) through my first professional haircut in over two decades. I was insanely nervous, but was very pleasantly surprised by the demeanor and approach of the woman who actually took the scissors and clippers to my head. I’m really pleased with the results and could have even gone a little bit shorter perhaps.

Largely because of my nerves and my caution to get it right, I didn’t end up donating the hair. Many people have asked about this already. I wanted to, but found the hair donation centers to be remarkably picky about how they want their hair delivered and precise stipulations. That’s their right, I guess, but they have to understand it’s going to deter a lot of marginal hair donation. Anyway, the hair instead ended up on the floor:

I am overdue for an actual shower where I think my hair will start to wave and bounce up a little and take its more permanent shape. It’s such a little thing in some ways and yet feels like such a big deal. I guess everything feels like a big deal, part of reducing the scale of the horizon down to a day or even a few hours at a time, just trying to muddle through and find the next thing to look forward to, the next thing that isn’t totally desolate and bleak. The days may just alternate for awhile, struggling between really arduous and surprisingly not awful. Fish’s car died today and I can sympathize. The energy it takes to go, to try, to move, to be, is just overwhelming.

At least I’m still capable of contriving a way to give looks like this occasionally:

So it goes.