The Plight of the Half-Gray/Half-Red Strand of Hair

disclaimer: this is off topic and not intended to be anything near good work. it is just some therapy that i needed right now.

I’ve always had a weird fascination with plucking gray hairs from their homes atop an aging head. I did it to my mother when I was younger, before she got smart and starting getting help from a box. She would always point to one and say “that’s from the time that you did such and such” (at this point I could fill in the blanks with so many options from the time she caught my boyfriend camping out in my closet to the time I got caught shoplifting). We would always laugh, her blaming her stress and aging on me, both of us knowing that her attempts to raise me alone were only part of the reason she was going gray.

I remember the day I got my first gray hair. Or at least the first day I noticed it. I was sitting on a bench outside, when my boss pointed one out. I immediately screamed and ran inside. Yep. There it was, attempting to hide amongst the sea of darkness to which it used to belong. I immediately yanked it from my head. It could hide at the bottom of the trashcan. I was only 22.

The women in my family are very lucky that we age very well. If you looked at my mom, you wouldn’t guess that she is 57. Our sprits probably play a decent role in this, but our genes definitely play an even bigger role. Our hair, however, tends to betray us in that area. Luckily, this is an inexpensive fix. I didn’t start dying my hair as a fix to me getting a few grays, but now I know that I can never stop dying my hair. Luckily, my best friend is a hair stylist.

I feel sorry for them, though. As I was standing in the mirror, tweezers in hand just a few minutes ago, I was staring at the tiny shaft in my grasp, and it told me a story. A sad story. The last time that I had my hair colored was a few weeks ago. My hair grows pretty quickly, and this piece of hair was half-gray and half-red. This tiny, dead piece of me reminded me of another dead piece of me. It reminded me of the night a few weeks ago and the unhappy events that occurred then, and following that night. Of the loss of something that I treasured and can never get back. It reminded me that just as my hair was losing the pigment that made it who it once was, I also lost something that made me who I once was.

I realized that part of the reason that I have been so down lately is that there are quite a few things changing in my life, one affecting the other, creating layers too thick for me to find their true center. They’ve all smashed into each other so much that I can’t figure out where the root of it all lies, but I have a good idea. But knowing the why and the where doesn’t really help. I can’t color over the problem with a simple dye job.