Split Ends
By: Lilli Vehikite
Tags: Hair, Beauty, Feminism, Women, Poetry

The chair is cool and slick against my legs, and the barber’s cape is snug at my neck. A woman moves behind me, her scissors whispering in my ear, her hands lifting and separating and sentencing to death. Looking down at my front, I can see bits of myself scattered all around. I am thirteen years old, and the floor is thick with inches and inches.

Haircuts are like reinvention, a form of rebirth, the shedding of old skin, a fresh start. What other parts of us can we trim down to the quick and feel nothing? What other elements of your body are so easily molded?

I close my eyes and let the shush of this minor surgery radiate through me.

******

My brother is twelve when he begins refusing to allow my father to shave his head down to a military-grade buzzcut every three weeks. Instead, he goes to a barber and cultivates a fade with a long bit on top. He uses gel and water over the bathroom sink.

Sometimes he lets it grow out too long, sticking out thick and wild, and, once he begins to grow scruff on his chin, I miss the little boy with the nearly bald head.

******

Hairspray hangs thick and heavy in the air, my friend brandishing the can like a weapon of war. She lays siege on my head, curling, pinning, teasing.

Am I pretty yet? I wonder. Is it enough?

******

“Please don’t cut your hair.” My sister smiles conspiratorially, the counsel directed toward her falling on uninterested ears — she would never cut it anyways.

Naomi is five foot nine and has hair that falls all the way to her waist, heavy and thick. She has skilled hands, the type that can braid and twist and draw order out of messy tangles. She traces ancient patterns passed on by women and men through time — in, out, over, under. Weaver.

******

I am about five minutes from being high off the fumes radiating from the ends of my hair, but the girl who is watching my foils just taps her long fingernails against them with a slight tilt of her head. Her name is Kam The Hair School Student, and I am the first balayage she has ever done.

I watch Kam through the mirror’s reflections as she fidgets behind me. Her hair is short and curly and violently purple, and her hands are gentle from inexperience and hesitancy as they part and segment and divide. In the first hour of my treatment, we had gotten all the small, easy questions out of the way. Are you from Pocatello? No, but I live here with my brother. What made you want to get into cosmetology? It’s always been what I’m best at. What is our favorite color you’ve ever had your hair? Green.

I forgive her for the fumes when the foils come off and the heady perfume of toner replaces the sharp bite of the bleach, and then I forgive her again when my hair is rinsed and dry and the blend from brown to blonde is as smooth as melted chocolate.

******

As I get older, I dance along the edges of extremes, like shuffling around a poolside without ever getting wet. Shave it on the sides and dye it blonde. Grow it out until it brushes my hips and perm it into tight curls. Instead of doing any of these things, I settle for the comfortable lull of the middle ground and natural locks, afraid of judgment, of eyes, of hmm I think I liked your hair better before.

But what if…?

In the end, I peel myself back at the scalp only to find that I am wholly constructed of insecurities and split ends.

******

My mother weighs the cardboard box in her palm, an old towel wrapped around her shoulders. The box bears a smoldering woman; her partially concealed face is airbrushed smooth and her hair is the color of honey.

“I think it’s going to be too light Mama,” I tell her. I am wearing cheap plastic gloves that stretch with me as I flex my fingers. She turns over the box in her hand again, studying the back.

“It’s cheap,” she counters with a sigh, “I don’t think it will be light enough.”

My mother has been a blonde until her first pregnancy when her hair had dropped to a darker shade, a sun-kissed brown. The return to blonde must constitute a return to form for her. I have seen her eyes trace old pictures, and I imagine that looking at them she saw separate selves — the carefree young girl, the tired mother.

I have never seen my mother with blonde hair, except for these pictures. For some reason, the idea of it manifesting in front of me was disturbing in a vague sort of way.

Hours and rinses and a blow dryer later my mother’s hair is barely even tinted. She mutters in disgust, frustrated by the lack of results and the validation of her suspicions, but inside I harbor secret relief.

*********

Samson with his powerful tresses, the Goose Girl with her golden plaits, shaped wigs powdered in flour, curls laid in wax, carefully coiffed beehives, scalps as war treasures. There is this undefinable mystic surrounding our hair, this part of us that is not us, this part that we can dye and bleach and cut and weave. I run my fingers through my own mane, examining the textured mix of coarse and fine, and wonder if these strands are the source of some secret power for me. Maybe if I let it grow down past my toes a young prince will climb my braids to the top of my tower.

***********

The stylist smiles and swivels me around. “What do you think?”

I am thirteen years old, and I look at myself in the mirror and see a stranger. She looks back at me, her hair a tight crop around the sides, her bangs falling across her face in a bold swoop. A pixie cut, one I picked from the pages of a fashion magazine. I reach up and watch the stranger in the mirror mimic my movements, her hand, my hand, brushing her bare neck, tracing the prickling line where the hair ends.

I stare and stare, and the stylist nods behind me, her electric-blue bob nodding with her. “It suits you.”