Strands: On Cancer, Hair, and Grieving a Stranger

“She touched my hair with fingers fluent in love.”

She cuts my hair one morning in her apartment in Brooklyn and I fall a little in love. It is the year when all the punks and queers and weirdos seem to get the same haircut where one side is longer than the other. Slanted hair in a straight world. My haircutter is a trans woman with auburn ringlets, Dorothy Allison books on her shelf, frilly dresses and stained aprons tumbling from her closet. When she puts her hands on my head and rummages through my curls, it’s as if her hands are planting something there in the thicket.

*

Hair is an erogenous zone. This means that hair is sensitive to stimulation and to sexual arousal, but the word erogenous stems from the Greek words eros and genous, translating to love-producing. What the haircutter does is what feels like love, but I like the idea that the hair is also offering love to the person who is cutting it. In some cultures, people mourning the death of loved ones cut their hair: a sacrifice or an offering to replace what else they couldn’t give.

*

A year and a half after that great haircut, before I am thirty years old, I am diagnosed with breast cancer. Late at night, I watch the ceiling flash with the crooked shadows of cars outside the window as I try to confront that the enemy of my life is the very body in my bed. I don’t know how to talk to it anymore; I don’t even know if it is still mine to talk to.

Some remote part of me finally agrees to chemotherapy and one night, after the shower drain has filled too many times with clods of my hair, I ask my partner to shave my head before the chemo can pilfer the rest of it. In our small bathroom, he bends over me with the buzzer. I look in the mirror, not at my hair unfurling onto the floor, but at the tenderness of my lover’s hands on my naked head.

*

I become a hat-buyer: grungy baseball caps, debonair fedoras, Holden Caulfield ski hats with long furry ears that make me feel like I could trudge through mountains of tundra and so maybe I can do this. While an IV drizzles into my strongest vein, I look out the window at the snow slowly sinking past the oncology floor, down to the dirty streets of New York, where strangers drift by with hands in snug pockets, the snow falling gracefully on each wisp of their beautiful hair.

*

One cold Saturday night, I go out with a friend to a queer dance party. The crowded room is hot in all the good ways. I shimmy until I begin to sweat, my wool hat itchy and humiliating. I look around at the women and queers doing their thing in the city that people move to in order to become free. For the first time in public, I toss my hat off. The world keeps turning, people keep dancing, my bald head keeps nodding with the beat.

*

When my hair finally transforms into what looks like a species of Chia Pet, I think about emailing the woman who gave me my last great haircut, but I want to let it grow more. When I walk down the street and the wind moves through my stubble, the only thing I am conscious of is that I am alive.

*

Time exists in relation to how long my hair is: I finished treatment less than a year ago, and my hair finally needs a haircut. I am now 2,404 miles from Brooklyn, in Arizona, where I almost forget what my body went through to stay alive. I whisper to it late at night. We are learning to talk to each other again.

When I see the quantity of heart emojis people are leaving on the Facebook wall of the red-haired woman who cut my hair years ago, an eerie suspicion spirals up my back. Sometime during a recent winter night, the woman who cut my hair had taken her life.

I had bumped into her a couple times before I left: She was singing queer country songs, her own hair always as regal as a sculpture. I don’t know if she spoke to her body late at night. I don’t know if she ever said I forgive you the way I am trying now to say to mine. All I know is that she once touched my hair with fingers fluent in love.

There is no hair left on my head that the woman in Brooklyn touched, and yet I can’t stop thinking of her. I wish I had called her for another haircut, that my hair could have produced enough of what she needed to stay; or that we could have switched places and I could have set aside her scissors and put my hands on her head for as long as it took.

*

Instead of going to a salon, I call a new friend and sit in her backyard one morning on a tall stool under a mesquite tree with limbs that bend and bow. I tell my friend that I had cancer, and then I watch my hair fall like confetti from my face onto the ground. Later I will sweep it up with the dust and mesquite leaves and the rest of the long day, but for now I sit up on the stool, my body still heavy on the earth.

*

For Bryn Kelly