'i'm giving you a haircut, walking to the sushi mart...'

'i'm giving you a haircut, walking to the sushi mart
shopping at the goodwill, learning how to swing dance
and i sink so deep in you, you gonna save me or not?'
(Kyle Andrews)

Lauren said tonight, over carnitas and margaritas, that she thinks I'm looking good these days. I was telling her about a random cute girl coming up to me in the library earlier this week, telling me she liked my haircut. ("Pssst. I really like your haircut.") Lauren asked me what I did. I blushed, mumbled a thank you and turned away, in true Emily fashion. Lauren laughed and said, "You know she was hitting on you, right? Next time a random cute girl approaches you and tells you she likes your hair, try this: don't run away."

It hadn't occurred to me that the random cute girl might be hitting on me. Seems pretty far-fetched. Kind of ridiculous, honestly. I've got so many straight girls, gay boys, and happily partnered friends in my life that I've kind of forgotten what it might be like to, I don't know, flirt with someone.

Later on the drive home, giving in to insecurity, I turned to Lauren and asked if she really thought I look good like this, scruffy-headed and all. Lauren's not one to pull her punches and in true Lauren fashion said that she'd never been a fan of the bald look. And I've always known that, somewhere in the back of my head, but tonight she elaborated. She explained, as only a true friend can, that she associates my being bald with my being in a bad place. That the specific periods of my life in which I've decided to shave it all off have been times she saw me as seething with rage, acknowledged or not, and shrieking at the world, "Fuck you. Here I am, so fuck you."

And she's right. Not that I've been furious all these years of having a cropped 'do (and I really do love the cropped 'do), but that those moments when I actually chopped off all the locks in the first place, whether junior year of college, or miserable in Philadelphia, or almost five years in to a relationship that maybe should have lasted five months, were moments of desperation, whether I knew it or not.

She said that it's a pleasure, now, to see me sporting a look out of contentment instead of out of rage or misery or trying to please or shock the people, the world, around me.

It was a pleasure, in turn, to have someone who knows me so well, who loves me so much, put it so succinctly, and it makes me feel even better about going back to my roots, so to speak. I might keep it at this funny scruffy phase for awhile, or I might not, and I might dye it blond, or I might dig out of the closet that outdated (if unopened) bottle of burgundy from a few years back, or maybe I'll go au naturel for a while longer. Or, who knows, maybe I'll end up shaving it all off again one of these days, but from a place of peace instead of a place of rage. I do have a good head for being bald, and the softest peach fuzz of anyone I know.