The Person I am Becoming

Maybe change is harder for me than it is for others, and maybe I've not taken risks—have not traveled on my own throughout, say, Morocco; have not sung for my living in subway stations; have not acted on behalf of tomorrow without first shoring up today. I run, I push, I fight, I dream, but there's framework about me, and ground.

Yesterday I decided to have my hair cut in a new way—to give up twenty-five years of looking essentially the same for a shot at looking like the person I suspect I have become. I decided to change something that doesn't much matter but also matters hugely, just to prove to myself that I can. I sat in the chair of a girl named MacKenzie (an artist, I'd been told; a girl with ideas). I said, "Tell me what you would do."

She studied me. She spoke some truths. She began to tell me her story.

I was there for two hours, maybe more. I sat in her chair on a rainy day while she worked out the texture of my hair, named the shape of my face, described my head as flat, then laughed. "Don't worry," she said. "That's nothing. I've got a hole in mine." Then she cut and blew the hair dry. "Looks good," I said. She said, "I'm not even half done." She cut some more, she stood back, she cut, she blew it dry. The others in the salon stopped by.

Finally MacKenzie held up a mirror and I stood and I looked, and I might have cried, for what she had done was so good and so right. Cried for the good of this small act of letting go, of trusting someone else with me, of trusting myself to be less afraid to emerge as the person I am yet and yet becoming.

I have less hair. My head is lighter. I will wear Magda's coat and walk with my shoulders back, my green eyes high.