Hairpiness

My hair is long. It's the longest it has ever been.
The reason, however, is only slightly aesthetic. Yeah, I love how awesome it looks - how gothic romantic it looks in the rain, how "mad professor" it looks when it tangles and runs wild. It's annoying, it gets in my eyes, it plugs up my sink and bathtub and it takes ages to dry but I love it.

Because it is my happiness.

Fifteen years ago I read a book by Robin Hobb that I adored - fantasy series that had a cultural tradition that would have the characters cut their hair when their loved ones died. The closer they were to the person the more hair they would cut off. For a fellow soldier a small lock of hair would be cut off - for a friend a handspan, but for a mother, a father, a son or a king, they would shave their hair down to a garishly short, prickly length. Those people would be described as "grief shorn" and their grief would show not only on their faces but also on their head.
Their hair would grow and their grief would fade, but they would always remain changed by that pain, by that sorrow.

Whenever I have been sad, grieving, or needing a change I have usually gone out and shaved my hair down to a short, prickly bristle and started all over again. But the past year has been the happiest I have been in a very long time. I have a job I like, I have squeezed all the toxic elements out of my life (like popping a rather petulant zit), and I am in love. (Yeah, go ahead, gag and roll your eyes...!)

And my hair shows this. I have had no reason or need for a change, I have felt no itch to just start all over again, to change who I am on the outside in a vague attempt to change the turmoil I feel within. I feel....content. I have found a peace, of sorts. Sure, the nightmares still linger as they always will, of cold white corridors, of wordless weeping, of loss, betrayal, and pain - all the things that make up a life lived, and yeah - I probably hate people now more than I ever have before...but I have come to find a peace in that.

But I can't show that peace, that contentment, on my face every day, so I wear it upon my head. The length of my hair is the length of my happiness - a full year and a bit of it. I hope it continues to grow at its manic pace, but for a long has my hair is a curly, frizzy mess the coils around my face, know this, friends: I am happy.