Category: Blog

We can’t place her

to rest in the forest,

as was her last wish.

Evidently, ashes

buried or scattered

are considered

by agency regulations

to be a final form

of illicit squatting,

to violate a rule

that states remains

of a deceased “creates

permanent occupancy”

of a specific place,

which is not allowed;

further, the remnants

once given back

to the gentle earth

fall oh so softly

into the category

of “perpetual use,”

thus not passing

criteria, due to being

“incompatible

with the purposes

for which the land

is managed.” So,

the legal issue is

clearly settled

but not her soul.

All week instead of drafting my screenplay I’ve been Netflix-surfing, lounging half-on, half-off the loveseat. My ‘day off’ has ballooned into a trance without time. At first I enjoyed this sitcom that’s playing. Now I’m enduring its final seasons like a dentist’s appointment, numbed and slumped, waiting to be freed.

So when Santosh suggests that a change will do me good, and asks me to drive her to the nail salon, I can’t refuse.

The preparatory scrubbing of my wife’s trimmed nails takes seventy minutes, an emery board, a chisel, a powderpuff, and other tools I can’t name. I feel sick to my stomach, then realise it’s because it smells like a dentist’s appointment, then realise why: calcium nebulised in the air. The nail technician begins finessing Santosh’s cuticles.

The décor is white and teal. Small bottles stand in military formation on shelftops and ledges. The technician is small, northeastern, and black-uniformed. A writer is never offduty, but there really is nothing else to observe.

I try playing songs in my head, but my internal playlist keeps looping “Kryptonite.” I vow to listen to a hundred new songs every night in my sleep, to proliferate my weapons against boredom. A bored writer is like a pervert priest: a disgrace to the profession.

The technician is scraping at Santosh’s nails again, her motions precise, her head bent. Did Michelangelo labour so over David? Does even a masterpiece merit this insane attention to detail? Maybe art does, art for the ages, but not nails.

I rouse myself and fish for topics of conversation. Santosh responds, but never looks up from the narrow teal cushion on which her hands rest. The heat on her hands from the glue-setting UV lamp seems to have bathed her brain, too, in bliss: immobilised it, as sunshine does a cat.

Under the table my knees quiver, then shake, then earthquake. I picture plucking my eyelashes out, lash by entangled lash, to distract myself from the bloodred murder of two hours of my life.

Back home I unplug the television, dustbin the remote control, and sit down at my laptop. ‘Now or never,’ I mutter. On the blank white face of my future, the cursor blinks and blinks, then freezes in a Mona Lisa smile.

Mel spent so many hours in that camping chair, the sun had bleached her hair to match the waves of wheat looming beyond the outfield fence. The heat of the plains could melt her chair’s plastic cupholder but it couldn’t stop her from spending another Sunday waiting for Nate’s turns at bat. It was her son’s first summer of travel ball and she was developing a theory on the difference between parents and player-parents: parents lounged lakeside with umbrella drinks while player-parents suffered sciatica from prolonged sitting and sipped Gatorade to avoid dehydration. But they did so with purpose. They were doing it for their kids, fueling their boys’ obsession with this game that moved at its own languid pace and spoke its own perplexing language. She had learned what it meant to turn two, to get under a can of corn, to charge hard on a Baltimore chop and throw it up the line to first. She was still trying to understand how Nate could feel more at home on this dirt diamond than he did in his actual house, a sentiment he shared with her just the week before. Maybe this was just Nate. She wanted to believe it was only his father and his grandfather and their own philosophies echoing through him.

As for her, their actual house sounded nice, especially nice when the temperature reached triple-digits, heat rippling the air above the metal bleachers behind home plate. Mostly on these Sundays in the dregs of summer she thought about air-conditioning, a long but quiet car ride back home. Lately, however, she’d been escaping to another memory: the spring season ending suddenly with a playoff loss, seeing Nate overwhelmed with grief for perhaps the first time. Her fifteen-year-old boy brought to his knees on the pitching mound, his tears falling and mixing with the artificial clay. In that moment, she felt the sudden urge to tell him something that might quell his sadness. Don’t worry, sweetheart, there are so many more games ahead, she wanted to say. Too many, she thought. Even while she baked in the sun, she felt a shiver knowing her son would experience so many of life’s highs and lows within white chalk foul lines. He was the most like himself there; away from the field he only waited to return to it.

In between innings, she gazed out toward the empty mound. Even after a week of no rain, the clay still looked damp with Nate’s tears. Maybe for her it always would. On the car ride home, she peered from the corner of her eye at her son sitting next to her in the passenger seat, half-asleep and half-obliterated by the sun. For the first time, she couldn’t see her little boy. Only the man he might become.

Tired Boy

                        goes on            &                                 on
                                                                                                no rest for him

                                                                                                            keels    reels

outside Quiznos

Tired Boy

                        dreams

                        drums

                        drafts

                        dwells with    

                                    kettlefish

                                    honest

                                    cotton candy

Bold

            heavy

              new

                        dissipated sockets

                                    flows

                                                mineshaft silver

                        more he asks

                                                            move

                                                more
                                                            move

Tired Boy

                                    lumpy studded spitting image:

                                                                        (dadadadaaaaaa) Jack

Kennedy

            his grace

                                    water drops

                                                            on spattered russet locks

A tour bus

sunken greyscale tower

lovestruck one bedroom

two miles from Iowa

Tired Boy

                                    gone

                                                going

                                                going

                                                            gone
                                                going  

                                                            gone

                                                            gone

                                                            gone

I was sitting on campus with a friend, my laptop open on a blank Google Doc page on my lap when a girl skated by. She was wearing a lavender hoodie and black jeans, decorated with chains and a black surgical mask over her nose and mouth. Her hair was lavender with white tips. I noticed my friend was looking at her skate by, too, just as mesmerized as I was.

 “Look at her hair,” She said.

“That’s the main character,” I joked. “And we’re all side characters.”

My friend said, “At least your hair is bright. You could be the comic relief or something.”

Subconsciously, I reached up to brush my hair over one shoulder. “It used to be brighter.” I said. “This is technically it’s natural color, but it’s been through so much over the years that it just keeps getting darker.”

I love the term “strawberry blond” (possibly in part due to the mitski song “Strawberry Blond”) but it always makes me smile when people describe me as such. My hair used to be on the lighter side, if you can believe that. People used to stop me in the street to comment on my hair. Mostly to ask if it was natural, which always confused me because I was like, 12 years old at the time and had never even thought about changing my hair color. Then freshman year, I met a ginger waitress at a restaurant in Austin who had the tips of her orange hair bleached. Her hair was in a thick, low ponytail that day so I thought it resembled a fox tail. The nice waitress let me snap a picture of her hair on my phone, so that when I went to the salon the next day I could show it to the hair stylist and ask for exactly that. As the lady was shampooing my hair, I remember her saying, “You know, people pay  to have your hair color”. I thanked her, feeling awkward that she would say that about 30 seconds before I dyed my natural hair. I said, “Yeah. I just wanted to try something new”. 

After my salon trip, my hair didn’t look much like the waitress’s, but I loved it nonetheless. The stylist had gone for more of an ombre look, with the orange at the top of my head fading to platinum-blond tips. (Think Black Widow in Endgame, but I did it first. She copied me.) When I went back to Houston and saw my friends after that, they loved it, too. They said it looked like fire and did a mini-photoshoot at a park where I got to show off my hair. It was awesome. I honestly felt like such a badass. It’s funny how such a seemingly miniscule change in your appearance can raise your confidence levels through the roof. Like how people love the character customization aspect of certain video games, I loved customizing myself to my liking.

I continued to bleach the tips of my hair for the following few years, and quickly learned to do it myself with bottle dye in my bathroom at home. For those years, when people would ask if my hair was natural, I would say “This part is” while putting my hand on the top of my head, “But this is bleached” and hold up the tips for them.

Then junior year came, and around that time is when I started getting into k-pop. One of the defining traits of K-pop idols is their ever-changing, brightly-colored, dyed hair. Of course, this wasn’t the first time I had been exposed to this. Before that, I met a girl with a bright blue pixie-cut and striking blue eyes that matched her hair color. The one, small glimpse of her that I got has never left my mind. So maybe that’s where it all started, but it was definitely the K-pop idols that got me really thinking about it again. Fans will pick their favorites of the myriad of colors that an idol’s hair has been, saying things like “Bring back blue Yeonjun!” or “Mint Yoongi supremacy!” (that second one is a pun because the idol’s full name is Min Yoongi, and his hair at one point was mint-green).

I wished I, too, could change my hair to any exotic color on a whim and see what suited me best. I would’ve stood out, I would’ve been able to showcase my uniqueness for everyone to see, but alas, my cheer squad had a “no unnatural hair colors” rule, so I had to wait until the season was over to start my colorful new life. During that time, I remember feeling bored with how I looked. I was so jealous of the k-pop idols I saw on my screen, who went through like, three hair colors a month. And I was sitting here stuck with my lame, ginger-ish blond-ish red-ish hair.

Finally, I rounded out my cheerleading career in the winter of my senior year, and I could start doing whatever I wanted with my hair. First, I decided to do clown-nose red. But not my whole head, just prominent streaks. I told myself I would never dye my roots any color other than my natural color because then the orange would grow back in and it would look bad. Like a little split of orange on the top of a head of different colored hair. This, combined with the blond tips I already had, has been my favorite look so far. It really looked like fire, now. Then came quarantine, which was interesting because teens everywhere started to get bored and dye their hair. Now, what seems like everyone on TikTok has posted a video showing off their new, bright, hair. And it always looks great. I love that everyone is doing this now, because to me, it seems so futuristic. I wondered if they’re all dyeing their hair because they got bored with themselves, too. If they also looked in the mirror and said, “this is the same person I’ve been staring at my whole life.” Some people were saying it was because changing their hair color gave them a sense of control in their lives in a moment where they felt like they were losing control of it. Other trends included girls cutting their own bangs (one that I never really understood because it only ended up looking good like, 50% of the time), getting piercings, slitting their eyebrows, etc, etc.

Anyway, I changed my hair color again my first semester of college. This was a big one, because I had never dyed my whole head before, but on my roommates’ requests, we bought purple dye and dyed my entire head purple. My roommates all put gloves on and soaked my hair in the dye while I sat in the bathtub. Then we washed my hair, dried it, and it was dark. Like, really dark. I had expected a nice, lavender color but instead it was almost black. I was not a fan. My hair wasn’t light anymore, and there was no telling if it would ever be as light as it once was ever again. I could kiss “strawberry blond” goodbye.

“It’s… really dark” I remember saying.

My roommates said to that, “I think it looks great. Honestly, I like it better than your light hair,” but I was pretty sure that they were only saying that because they were the ones who had suggested it. It was the biggest change in my physical appearance that I had ever made, and I hated it. I immediately started thinking about ways I could get it back to its natural color. For my whole life, I considered being a mostly-red-head part of my identity, and I had so recklessly erased that. I didn’t want to tell my mom because I knew she would hate it. Even when I just dyed parts of my hair, she would alway say afterward, “It’s cute, but I like your natural hair better.” I couldn’t imagine how she would react to such a big change as this one.

My mom found out when my roommate sent a picture to her mom, and her mom told my mom. And it wasn’t that she reacted poorly, per se, just that she did that subtle, motherly, condemnation that I’m sure we are all familiar with. Honestly, I think the fact that my mom didn’t seem to outright despise it was one of the reasons I didn’t end up despising it. After I showered a few more times and the color got less black and more purple (think Raven from the Teen Titans cartoon), or maybe it was just the fact that I slept on it, but a few days later I felt much better about my new hair. That regret I felt passed so quickly that I felt stupid for ever feeling it. I still felt a bit like I had lost my “ginger” identity, but it was okay now, because I gained a new “purple-hair-girl” identity, which I found even better. I loved my purple hair. I really felt like a K-pop idol. I kept thinking that if I had a fanbase, this would be their favorite look: “Grape Megan superiority!”, they’d say.

After the purple faded and it went through this strange orange-purple phase, I borrowed some of my roommate’s pink dye and put in light pink streaks in my hair. Then that quickly faded and I was back to the bleak orange-brown that I was trying so hard to avoid. I felt boring again.

It’s not that I want to be the “main character” or anything like the Lavender Skateboarder, the Blue Pixie, or the Foxtail Waitress probably was. I don’t care about grabbing people’s attention like they did, either. I just feel like if I can look more interesting, I should. I want to be like the girl I saw skateboarding, not because I want other’s attention, but because I want to look so uniquely me. I don’t want to look like anyone else. I want to express myself. It’s more important to me that people are impressed with how I express my personality than that they find me attractive. So it’s a strange mix of individuality, while also being that I wanted to emulate the Lavender Skateboarder, the Blue Pixie, the Foxtail Waitress, Raven from Teen Titans, or k-pop idols because I found them attractive. The day before my roommate dyed her hair from pink back to its natural color, she told me, “I think I’m gonna get highlights again. Because when I got highlights, I remember everyone complimenting me on how good it looked. Now, when people see I have pink hair, they just say, like, ‘Oh. It’s pink. How fun’, or ‘interesting’, or whatever”. She preferred the former; I preferred the latter. Because I care more about looking what I want me to look like than what others want me to look like. Truly, I care more about looking “interesting” than looking “good”. It’s difficult to describe without sounding pretentious, and I’ve got nothing but love for the amazing women who prefer to keep their hair natural or who enjoy validation from outside sources about their physical appearance, but everyone’s different. It’s so interesting to me to see how people like to present themselves and why. I like hearing about the choices and reasonings that go into how people express their individuality through their style. And so, this is mine.