Later I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian Ocean. Before I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am loose and free, lax between the stylist’s comb and humming shears, as Lian meets their own eyes in the wall-length mirror.
“Just the left side,” they say.
The stylist winks. “I hear you,” he says.
And then he begins to trim.
It is nothing like when Lian first shaves themself. They don’t dare buy shaving cream. A razor could be slipped into a hoodie’s sleeve. A can of liquid could not. Instead they rub shampoo into their warm-soaked legs, like they do to me and my hundred thousand siblings on the occasions they could force themself to strip and shower and see themself, all of themself, even the parts they wish they could take a blade to and make disappear, like how with each pass of the razor the jungle sprouting from their skin thins and thins and thins. Until their skin is smooth and bare as farmland. They watch their hairs swirl down the drain and ask whose nightmares they are now. And I know that their body is theirs alone, its terrors only for them to see.
Then, they are lying in bed and watching Australia burn in the palm of their hand. They wonder if the world would heal faster without them in it. Their father throws open the door. He holds up a mass of tangled hairs in one hand, a plunger in the other.
“You can’t pass your classes, but you can waste your time and my money on vanity?” Lian flinches as their father hurls the evidence of their crimes in their face, and the tangled hairs are thick with sewage. “How dare you?”
Lian mumbles an apology, they’re sorry for hurting him, they didn’t mean to, they’ll clean up their mess, and their father isn’t there anymore, and Lian runs a thumb along my side, numbly, and I am greasy and tangled from weeks without washing, and if I had any more oil America would invade. Lian’s legs are prickly, they hurt them with every step, but as long as they eat their father’s food and sleep under their father’s roof, they daren’t hurt him by shaving again.
The stylist’s blade scythes through me, and I am free, dancing around Lian’s shoulders as I arc to the ground. Lian’s father is not here. Lian’s father is years and miles and memories away. But still he scoffs as the stylist’s nimble fingers work. “Twenty dollars for a sideshave? I could do that myself.” His eyes track each drifting hair as if he could count their costs. As if he could see the entirety of time from behind every eye, weigh the agonies and blessings of any choice, and with the confidence of eternity deem Lian’s haircut an injustice.
And Lian is filthy, scrubbing furiously at their tangled hair, feeling the muck of months wash free from their skin. Lian’s father is outside the bathroom door. Lian takes short showers. He appreciates that about them. Lian shakes the water from their hair, feeling the pleasant, soaked weight of it. Their hair could hold so much, they think. More than its weight in water. They wonder what else it could hold.
I land at Lian’s feet, and the stylist steps back. One half of Lian’s hair pours over their shoulder like black gold. The other is bare, stark, controlled, theirs. Very little is theirs, nowadays. A room they share, a job they hold, a form they own. Even their ideas are not their own. They wonder—if hair can cling to so much oil in water, could it perhaps soak oil from the dark-spilled seas? They search the Internet and are not sure whether to be disappointed that they are not the first, that a company in San Francisco has been making oil nets from human hair since before Lian knew their name.
I have known it all along, that Lian is neither the beginning nor the end. My long strands are swept aside, and Lian regards themself, the sleek and shimmer of their hair, while the stylist counts up the price.
Lian’s father is not here, but he spits, “Was it worth it? For you to feel better?”
Nobody is there to respond, but Lian’s lips still quirk up as they say, “Let’s find out.”
Later, I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian ocean. Before, I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am proud as Lian rises, thanks the stylist, and lives the strand of their life to its nowless end.
