Cropped

I got my hair cut.

It was a lot of hair. Until yesterday morning, it fell to my elbows. The plaits that the hairdresser cut off weighed nearly six ounces--and she went on trimming the hair still attached to my head.

I'd put so much work into it--both the color and the length. Over the last five years that mane had insidiously segued from my most noticeable physical feature into a piece of my identity: I was The Girl with the Long Red Hair. I feel kind of...plain...all of a sudden. Both more like myself and less so. Even the color seems a little quieter, pared down this way, and it'll go on bleaching over the summer. Recognizing my cropped reflection blends relief and bitterness in strange ways. Aha. There I am.  

Aesthetics will shortly become immaterial: it had to go. I won't have the time, energy, or resources to wash, dry, comb, braid, and tint an elbow-length mess of increasingly matted hiker-hair. After a while--probably not long--I won't care. Nobody else will care, either. Better to have it shorn neatly, now, than to lose my temper on a blistering 100-degree day and hack it to pieces with my pocketknife. I can't have my hair catching under pack straps, whipping into my eyes, twining around my neck in my sleep. Like so many things, there'll be no place for it on the trail. 

Whew.