my body is earthly

i'm growing out my hair

I cut my hair in incremental steps to avoid committing to an appearance that would distinguish me so effortfully. I think it seems effortless this way, as if I never considered what people think of me. And I’ve been telling myself since I was small that I would chop my hair into a pixie cut in college, after I’d grown it out and felt beautiful for long enough. 

Feeling beautiful was never hard. I assumed my identity as it was projected onto me, flipped back at me, reflected in the mirror that I now work hard not to look at too intensely for too long because that shit can really get to your head. A quick glance, no double takes. Just affirming it’s real. 

My body is a tool. My body is sacred, but not so sacred that it should be glorified. What a dichotomy. Aren’t glory and sanctity both holy in nature? For God's sake. My body is neutral, earthly, workable. 

I am not saying I always feel pretty, but I am saying that I always felt desired.

I always felt desired because I assumed something in my nature was desirable, and now it comes in waves with a little lip gloss. And my desirability has always been seemingly attached to my girlhood and feminine presentation. I haven’t been howled at on the streets since I cut my hair, and I used to want to feel unsafe that way. It made me feel visible.

Now, I can barely wear shorts more than a few inches above the knee, and only on my worst days do I miss the wolves howling.

Now, I have to get creative about feeling beautiful. I swear I love getting creative, even if it takes a gut wrenching, ideological upheaval of the very few ways I ever thought I could be beautiful. Now, I consider that I can pin the sides of my hair down and look like the androgynous girls I always admired and wanted to kiss growing up. I imagined what they looked like when they had sex. How would they do it? Like a man and a woman at the same damn time? Now, I’m a girl(ish) with some tattoos, slightly androgynous at times and I try not to think about what sex should ‘look like’. Now, I can wear a button down, buttoned down, and I feel a glowing brightness inside me because there are no rules. That’s a beautiful feeling, although I don’t always feel beautiful. Sometimes, I just feel cool with a little lip gloss and a button down buttoned down.

I wish this was just about hair. Joe March can do it. I can do it.

Men hardly call me pretty anymore now that my hair is as short as they.

I have to seek out unconventional tricks to make me more womxn, and they are far less glamorous than the top 10 methods on the front cover of magazines my mom forgot to hide. She left them sitting out on the coffee table, audaciously I reflect. I think I scoured them more than she did—always in secret and usually under the bed. Frantic, incessant, insecure, and aroused. 

Maybe mom does it in secret, too. Dear God, I hope my sister doesn’t. 

So, I seek out tops that I allow my nipples to accessorize the look because it feminizes me and bandanas that cover me on days that my shag is more pronounced and I don’t feel like wearing makeup. It takes real work to feminize myself, and it's impossible to completely masculinize myself, unless I turn my hat around and speak a little louder and lower than usual. Even that just seems to scream, ‘I’m gay and I’m demand your attention,’ but I’m not a lesbian and I am just captivating.

How tempting those magazines were! And Kiera Knightley looks so lovely with a pixie cut, and the word ‘pixie’ diminishes that overt masculinity of shortened, bangless hair, for when I think of ‘pixie,’ I think fairy. I don’t feel like a fairy. I just feel queer, sometimes cool, but so queer that my little brother thinks I’m a lesbian. Queer like weird, not like, gay. But that too.  

My innateness seems to be identifiable to everyone but me. Maybe they just thought of the words for it before I did. So, I guess I’m queer, but I thought I just liked girls. I never thought I’d reassure someone that I really do love men. I just feel strange sometimes, and also cool, and I use so much less shampoo these days. 

What might people think if I love a man in public if his hair is longer than mine? Christ. 

And I went off the pill because I was sick of artificially estrogenating myself to a point of such hyperregulation that I’d cry like clockwork and bleed so pitifully. I just wanted to shed more, watch it spill from me, even if it meant contracting in on myself, crippling, crumbling, crawling for relief from a cramping I carefully combated with cohosh and communion with women and with cycles and with swells and oh how I missed my bleeding so. 

Is anything more womanly than fucking yearning to bleed?

I want to deregulate myself, strip my body of foreign authority, and just use condoms, uninsured. I wanted to feel—feel it raw. 

Maybe I should be a lesbian like my little brother thinks I am. Condoms are expensive. Maybe I’ll get an IUD. 

My mom once told me she thinks I fall harder for men than I do women. But time has never stripped a woman from me like it has a man. I’ve been severed and torn by countdowns, time and time again.

Maybe I fall harder when love is on a timeline, Mom. 

Maybe I fall harder when I’m not falling at all. Rather, when I’m merging with someone who isn’t attracted to my femininity or masculinity or my short hair that now does have bangs but is so far from being fairy-like. I feel like I’m merging with you, someone attracted to who I really am, when my words are received, and you look at me and say nothing at all and I keep rambling with an upward inflection in my genderless voice. I don’t care to be a woman or a man or anything other than a favorite of yours. Maybe that’s a great ask, but I am not asking.

I’m neutral about few things, but this body can be one. One for me, one for you, one for all. My World is for my body, and my World is perceptive. So, perceive me, dear World. 

And since this is about hair, too, I’m growing it out because longer isn’t beautiful, but I must be.

—e.k

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