HairSnip.com

The chameleonic nature of a girl: a journey into short-hair?

     Since early years at school, kids used to call her Lizzie, the lizard. And she didn’t care about it, there was no way she could deny the fact that her moods, appearance, likes and dislikes always followed the ups and downs of social tide. Tropism to follow others was more evident concerning hair style and fashion. When all girls preferred pigtails wrapped in red ribbons like a Christmas gift, that’s the way her hair should also be. Next semester, tresses became a must, and she followed fashion, unconditionally. Permed hair was a hit in 1970 something. As soon as she had enough money for a walk at the hairdresser, her curls were the most commented ones at the university she was admitted into. During Woodstock days, she tried to convince everyone, including herself, that being hippie was just a matter of occasionally listening to Janis Joplin, wearing a Peace and Love symbol and ornamenting her long flowing hair with small flowers.

There came the fade of recreational use of psychedelic drugs, her “gates to consciousness", as she used to call them. This was her excuse, borrowed from mainstream zeitgeist. Everybody was doing this, why wouldn’t she? At that period, hair didn’t care to anyone, at least in the perspective of the group she felt she belonged to, and so her manes were pretty much similar to a piece of cloth we use to clean and dry the kitchen floor when someone accidentally drops a bowl of soup there. Things change over and over, and so did Lizzie. Now she was an executive modern woman, sophisticated, perfectly tuned to the Elizabeth Arden globetrotting circuit: Tokyo-Paris-London-New York. Milan was a bonus-city that her up scaling wages could afford. She had worked 12 or 14 hours a day, six times a week, for years and years, exactly to achieve the highest rank at the law firm where she started as a promising junior associate many years before.

 The price of ascension was gradually perforating the fragile structures of her being. She had many acquaintances, almost no friends. Once a year she offered a cocktail party at her loft at the Meatpacking District for the people who were still understanding to her way of being and tolerated her being always unavailable, running a marathon of business trips, complex legal cases dissected by hideous journalists, promoting charities and fundraising for Dafur humanitarian crisis,  eight hours a week of yoga (“me and Madonna share the same trainer", she used to say) and additional three hours a week at the ultra private spa where she was pampered at the most while answered and made phone calls like a drug dealer would do on a Saturday night.

 Love life? Sure! She was intelligent, elegant, gorgeous to the most, blonde from a bottle (no one would say that, so perfect was the coloring), long hair, sometimes with the aid of Italian extensions made of religious women’s hair in India and she had also awesome surgically built boobs. Tall, slim, almost to the point of starvation, as fashion demands from those women who want to fit a size zero. For people who still haven’t noticed, zero now stands for the old six, which was the number girls aimed to achieve during Marilyn Monroe’s golden age. Yes, she met and dated men, and had had dozens of boys in bed, ranging from early twenties to seventy-two years old ones. Affairs, friends with benefits, summer passions, one-night stands, she had all this. But love was unknown territory for the powerful girl. Her long hair was doomed to pass from one male hand to another, from one hairdresser to another. She has never been truly respected and loved. She was free, self-assuring, competent, the most successful failure one could achieve in terms of intimacy, trust and deep feelings. The old saying holds true, money can’t buy love.

 One day, alone, facing the shades of night, in her stylish place, she felt a sharp pain in her abdomen, too sharp, too unbearable. The best hospital‘s ambulance came into her rescue. She was near death, no one could ever imagine that the sudden pain was a rupture of abdominal aorta, a problem she could never guess she had (after all, who has plenty of time for regular check-ups, uh?). Lost liters of blood, her heart stopped beating twice, followed by lung infection while at the intensive care unit. The super killer bacteria almost did the job the abdominal aneurysm left unfinished.

 Lizzie, the lizard, effectively resembled those who surrounded her, very sick people. Visits at the hospital were scarce, although every fancy flower shop in town had received no little money to send her bouquets and a lovely “good recovery, honey" card. Teddy bears, books and magazines, as well as Belgium chocolate truffles, made of the finest gourmet cocoa paste. She got 10 boxes of them and her fragile stomach advised her to share everything with the hospital staff.

 Her most frequent visitors at the hospital were Mrs. Loneliness and her older sister, Miss Depression. “I am not depressed, just weak, in recovery". That was her motto as she cried rivers, sobbing silently not to arouse the nurses’ attention. Please, dear readers, don’t you think she was being neglected by hospital staff. Not at all. But she used to pretend they didn’t exist, that she didn’t need them, as she has always been doing in her life, playing the role of a self-made and self-sufficient woman. But there were those awkward moments… One day she was rendered by uncontrolled diarrhea and there was just time for calling for help as that gross fecal substance was deposited on bed. Humiliating, “but it was not her fault", she repeated this mantra a hundred times as they cleaned her. The day after, she was attacked by bursts of profuse sweating, fever was really annoying. And fucking frightening.

 Finally the tempest subsided for a while, and there she was, still in hospital, now at semi-intensive care unit. Nails? Unpolished and bad-looking. Bruises everywhere, dry skin, the prospect of a permanent scar in her sutured abdomen, more tangled than flowing hair, huge brunette hair roots saying hello to the white walls, too weak and hopeless to consider doing something to make herself look and feel better. She was pissed off, more than furious and God knows that a spoiled, formerly powerful, angry, very sick female executive is a task that even the devil refuses to get.

 Michel didn’t escape what life presented him. He was the night shift nurse there and his keen eyes had witnessed that scene before. Not beautiful to see, not easy to handle. She was a fragile patient, the remains of an attractive woman fed up with a double rupture: her aorta and her pride. He had suffered a lot in the past too, what gave birth to his enormous ability to be empathic, in and outside professional contexts. Having a pregnant wife die of a car crash was too much of a nightmare for him. It took him a long time to recover.

 And day by day Lizzie and Michel started exchanging superficial pleasantries as he took her vitals and changed her IV antibiotics bag. This woman is disturbingly nice, he thought, as he felt interested in her pain and sorrow. He had never done anything that would be unethical or for his exclusive benefit, jeopardizing the recovery of his patients. This wouldn’t be an exception to the rule. Observing successive interactions between them, one could say they became “professionally friendly" to each other. He felt impelled to help that ragged woman, mending some disconnected threads in her complex tessitura.

 Every day he reserved her a treat, almost a “let’s celebrate the fact you are alive"! He furtively smuggled an emery board to her hospital room and helped her care for her nails, hands and toes. The day after, Michel got almond oil to soften her hands, arms, ankles and feet, expecting that this would also do some good on her tortured mood. It did, as any clever observer would have been able to testify as she quietly relaxed during the brief moment he massaged the lower segment of her limbs with slightly warm oil.

 The nurse was harvesting small and consistent signs of her emotional recovery, her eyes got a new shine.  The most surprising thing happened in day 13 of his ultra-secret project “Let’s make her feel alive again", at the moment he entered her room for the very first vitals checking of his daily journey. She was energetically trying to brush her mane, extensions included, but everything was awfully tangled and she said she got tired of being a blonde and brunette, with dry, tangled hair.

 He asked: “What do you prefer to do? Any detangling product you need?"

 “No, Michel, would you please find me a pair of scissors? I need some long ones. I promise I won’t hurt myself, I simply need a plain, short haircut. "

 He was puzzled: “Would she be dooming herself to an almost shorn condition because her hair is tangled?!"

 He handles her a pair of scissors and asks, “Are you sure about this extreme measure? If you cut and regret, only a wig would bring some help. She simply said: “Yes, Sir!", and laughed, with a very amusing expression. 

 Lizzie didn’t notice how fascinated he got for having witnessed her flame of rebellion. That was a good signal of recovery. He succeeded in making her feel better. Only he knew how much. He did with her exactly what people have done to him some years ago. And now, there she was, self-imposing what seems to be a major change in her look, a totally anti-mainstream solution for a hair problem. For the first time, she didn’t follow fashion rules, she followed her heart. She needed to get rid of the fake Lizzie, opening space for the new girl who discovered that life needs space for intimacy, enough rest, material frugality without starvation, simple and fundamental pleasures.

 She snipped every hair extension of her head, feeling a little bit stronger at every cut she performed. Then it was the occasion for getting rid of bicolor strands and so a very short hair cut was arising in that aseptic scenario. Lizzie seemed to be so in the mood for a change, her behavior was clear evidence of the “new me" feeling that was blossoming. It was strange when she asked Michel : “Would you help me cutting the back, I won’t do a great job by myself."

 Surprised with the unusual of her proposal, he gladly accepted, feeling a kind of delinquent concerning his strict ethical issues: “My honor, but don’t expect precision. I have never done it. As soon as you are discharged from hospital, please, promise me you will set an appointment at your favorite habitual place."

 “I will, but I have no idea where I am going to, my new me has to do some research on salons... Please, let’s finish the cut."

 That was a moment of silence, a sacred celebration of her step by step healing. He was amazed that she didn’t hesitate a second about cutting her hair very short, leaving expressive amounts of her old being in the white sheet he enveloped Lizzie before the cutting started. Schnick, schnick, schnick… this methodic sound was a kind of gratitude prayer for regaining life, but a brand new one.

 A broad smile emerged into Lizzie’s face as the nurse offered her the polished surface of a hospital metal tray, standing as a surrogate of the portable mirror he didn’t have. She liked what she saw. She realized that her transformation was sealed with the removal of the fake extensions, and of everything related to an old meaningless life.

 She ended up with a little boy haircut, the gamine look of Twiggy was really similar to Lizzie’s, Michel said to himself.

 Patients come and go. Some die. Among survivors, there are patients who simply get back to the life they have always lived. But others, Lizzie was one of them, feel like they have deserved a second chance and eagerly reconfigure all established plans for the sake of having a significant existence. Totally liberated from the signals of death, she felt impelled to prospect new pathways, reconfigure perspectives, change what could be changed, moving towards her dearest values. Lizzie-herself killed Lizzie, the lizard as the wheel chair drove her to the new world outside the hospital building.

 Months after being discharged, she decided to go to the cozy brunch place she heard someone commenting about (by the way, has someone notice you know how gastronomical critics use the same stereotyped words to refer to simple delicious things as Benedictine eggs, crunchy croissants, orange juice and a cup of some vibrant mocchacinno?). Her life has changed a lot. She said bye-bye to corporate life, fancy things, and joined a non-governmental institution that provided, for example, basic sanitary conditions for distant places in Africa, vaccines for victims of huge natural disasters, and other basic benefits for very poor people. Her hair was kept in a very similar style of the one and her nurse did in January that year. But a little shorter. And for the very first time, and not the last one in her life, Lizzie entered a barbershop to maintain in good shape her lovely and charming boyish hairstyle. Why spending money in salons if the old Irish barber would help her for 15 dollars, tip included?

 Michel also read the comments about brunch at that café, and decided to go there right after the Sunday mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. What surprised him was the number of people who had the same idea of going there… At the verge of giving up, he listened to a melodic female voice calling his name. Bright eyes, smile on face, bouncing pair of handcrafted earrings, white T-shirt, a simple pair of jeans, ornamented the most exuberant short haired former patient he had. Stunning beautiful; simplicity settled there, not to leave her anymore. Her exposed nape and ears gave Lizzie extra charm. She was a happy size 6 now, for his surprise, and those extra pounds did a kind of miracle to rebuild and enhance her feminine shape.

 They exchanged glances and he approached her. She invited him for brunch, he couldn’t refuse. Not because this would allow him a fast lane away from the waiting list. He was a man very fond of female napes and that one he wouldn’t let go for a second time. Cafés are not hospital rooms. Now he can be a little charming naughty boy to a lovely short haired brunette… God seems to reward the dedicated church boys, he thought, just a second before the cropped girl hold his hand.

 A year later the same church near the Meatpacking District united the first loving couple in which the bride’s hair was shorter than the groom. No one, among the invited friends (yes, she has friends now), could say they weren’t the symbol of happiness, a treasure one can find anywhere, even in hospitals and crowded cafés.

Special notices

As I usually tell my readers, thanks for stopping by. Please feel free to send comments about this story. And, if possible, forgive me for language flaws. I am not a native speaker of this language. Scissors_fan has authorized Haircutting Stories publish her story because they value the authors and offer free access to the site. Thanks, by the way. 

Rate this story now.
5- Excellent 4- Very good 3- Good 2- Needs work 1- Poor  

Enter some comments about this story or see what others have said on the forums.