Brush

Me and D joined at the hip, or something more fundamental - Eve's rib, maybe - but different enough that we avoid consuming eachother. I keep resisting it, keep resisting this person who is teaching me so much through our intimacy I hate them at times.

Anyway, we were all playing Ticket to Ride, which is about colonising the United States via imaginary railways which in our world are thick veins of cars. We travel triumphantly between Sault St Marie, Chicago, and Helena and call out, like children, where we would want to take a train to in real life. A, the new subletter is here with us, part of the womb-like we now, an imminent lockdown condensing us into an enclosed consciousness, and we're feeling eachother out over the cup-stained table. It's very familiar. I almost fall asleep, especially when I realise I'm 30 points behind and withdraw my attention in a big rush to produce a studied coolness. I wish I was with a book. Since we decided to move me and D talk of nothing but interior design for our new flat; in consequence, our current abode is a waiting space where the furniture doesn't quite seem real, and neither does A, complex as a geode, someone I don't want to open.

At the end of the game, D points out a spider walking between the Christmas tree and the wall that I promised to get a month ago. While I don't like spiders either, D really can't handle them, and I jump at the chance to catch it between a cup and postcard, because I sharpen up at another's lack, fear, edges, always. If there is a chance to prove my strength I will take it and only then.

Small A, who has quietly won the game, leans, hoping, to open the window and aid me so the creature can escape. While I prepare to shake out, out, I look back to see her hair on one side aflame, lit by the candle I have set to create ambiance. 

 For a moment I don't understand what she's batting at but something in me realises and blows. Then the rich smell of hair in the room, then looking at A's fine curls bubbled and mottled like incinerated plastic on her left. She says "Oh," and I say, stupidly, "We need an emergency haircut!"

D comes in and puts their hands over their mouth for a long moment like something really terrible has happened. The time feels big, because of the strange glamour of fire, because of A being trans, meaning we all know her long hair must hold a lot. I finally release the spider. I feel ashamed, in some way. A is quite still and is guided to sit on the sofa. You can't escape the smell, but it's not unpleasant - minerallesque. One of those warning smells that it's important to move through.

In my room I look at my phone. I think: it's not my fault. I think again that if this happened to me I would be ashamed and would want to be alone. In responding to a message the entire incident is forgotten by me until D calls my name; "Jess - mind coming in for emotional support?"

A little Madonna diarama in the living room. With careful scissors D is cutting away the parts that no longer do service. A's face is blank enough that it's hard to connect the dry sobs with her person, but as I sit, she begins to speak of her childhood. Everything is charged but held still and calm by my friend D, usually fast moving, uncoordinated, anxious. Everyone hardens at the contact of air. D replies with a little story about when they were a child and their long hair, and nylon sleeve, caught on a hob, and vibrating through the air is a tunnel of transness and hair and knowledge which in my cisness I can only witness. 

Watching D move so slowly feels completely incongruent, and impatience fills me as if I'm the only moving, unwhole vessel left it could fill - all else cast in perfection; it could be no other way. Something is being made, and I take down every notch of it to replicate in my own life. Snip. To care. Snip.

"What do you think?" 

"It's perfect, unnoticable - " (it is!)

"Thank you."

Ending - the curl cream my friend gave me and I sweep it through A's ends so that each loop comes again to life, accompanying it with a short, potentially unnecessary lecture on curly hair maintenance so I can keep sweeping my hands through. The first time we have touched.

Hair memories otherwise

- Brushing the incongruous golden princess hair of my younger sister, envious/pitying;

- & plaiting my girlfriend's unruly hair every morning, sitting outside, while in every other respect we were locked away from eachother; 

- & feeling the new hard velvet of a friend's gender affirming buzz cut.