The Medley of Her Hair

A lustrous sheen of dark, dark as a midnight sky devoid of stars. So silkily smooth it slips between the gaps in my small, chubby fists when I grasp at it. Thick as a cloud brimming with unshed rain, my mother’s hair frames a face marked in downward-sloping lines of disapproval. I’d taken a marker scented with lemon and dragged it across the canvas of a wall. My repercussions like slashes of lightning, her anger landing with the blasts of thunder.

A swaying curtain, yet impenetrably black, the same shade as her words. It reaches mid-back now, sliced in a tidy, uniform line. I think myself old enough, ask if I can trim my own hair too to be like her. My only response is a discontented furrow of brows and a sashay of hair, a face turning from mine. In my nightmares that sheet of onyx, of deepest night, flutters further and further away, leaves me to join its likeness skyward.

Slim threads of light puncture through my mother’s dense tresses, break through and dot her roots like a sky mottled with stars. Not the needle-point stars on a cloudless evening but the version of them seen through squinted, half-focused eyes, all long, distorted lines weaving around one another. The edge in her voice ebbs away in the same fashion, slopes the sharpness of her face into upward tilts. I accept that sliver of a smile and sun myself in it.

Meteor trails of cotton white, dispersing like smoke. Once resilient and slick-straight, it wisps in a triangular formation down her back, the ends curled ever so slightly. Feathery and as pale as the clouds that drift through the air and dissipate into miniature tufts, my mom’s frizzy hair hovers around a face lined in smiles. Crows’ feet trace her eyes. When I sit with hands coated in oil and run them through her hair the way she did for me as a child, it is a scarce weight in my palms, and my fingers easily twist around over and over until the floating strands are tied and contained in a neat braid. I think myself old enough, and have trimmed my own locks to the shoulders.

My mom laments for her past hair, but the new burgundy dye is eye-catching. It seeps through a galaxy of silvered white and dulled black, a statement similar to her sleek obsidian except for its warmth, the way it gleams under sunlight instead of swallowing it. When I hug her and press my face into her hair, it smells of chemicals, but I know that scent will fade even as the color lasts. In my dreams this medley of hues is a sunset or maybe a sunrise, deep red in a sky dappled with pinpricks of light from a thousand stars.