Hemingway was fascinated by it and fixated upon it…a woman’s hair. Her hair, pitch, coffee or the color of sun rays, were his fetishes, his love cast in his stories, brutal and brutalized, beautiful and benevolent, a symbol of her, her essence, her sexuality and ultimately…her self. All was and is embodied in her hair. Be it sheered short or left to grow unchecked, wild and long, abandoned or adored—it is arguably the most telling part of a woman: a living trust of memory and self-evolution, a bold expression of all that she is and all that she rejects. It is her strength and vulnerability, her swagger and style. It is her hair.
I miss my hair, shaved clean off after my vault into Motherhood; I patiently await its return. For years prior, decades really, I wore my hair close to the bone, a stippling of dark brown too close to the scalp to clutch. I was not of the ilk of long tresses then. I wanted no man or woman to have a strong hold on me. Thus, there was no shock by which to pull me into the cave, captured. My youth stood bold to the tips of my spikes, cactus spines of resilient resistance. I loved my short hair and it shone...until…until the death of my Grandfather. Something strange happened in my grief, in the loss of this man who was such a constant. He who was our Northern star now shot from the constellation of our hearts into the cosmos, heaven bound. And all of the sudden, I felt the profound sense that something was missing. When his ashes settled into Earth, I vowed to never again cut my hair. What was once the neon sign of my riotous heart became the maudlin threads of mourning. My hair took on a new life; it transformed into the curator of my own personal history. For in my hair was the legacy of when we were whole and living. So, I began to let it grow as if my hair itself could stop time and hold within its course density; the things that were changing and slipping and fading.
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