© ennui  10/2717 oslo

This morning, she decided to wash her hair the old-fashioned way, with warm water running down the faucet and her face slightly caressing the ceramic basin. Instead of fragrant shampoo, she decided to use the bar of soap that smelled of lavender. As she rinsed her hair and gently lathered the hair on her nape, going through to her forehead. She began to recall one of the stories from her childhood.


Her mother had always told her not to wash her hair so frequently. And that she should use a special soap, so that her hair won't fall out. "Nobody loves a bald woman," her mother would scoff. "Nobody loves a woman with short hair."


The soap her mother used to give her was made with herbs that only grew in the town where she grew up. Her mother would rinse her hair and regale her with stories of fairies and wild animals that had long, luscious black hair that would turn a rusty, reddish-brown in the morning sunlight. Of course she didn't believe her mother back then. Nobody in her town had hair in any other color, not even the old ladies and the dead.


There was something odd about tonight. The soap kept slipping from her hands as she tried to apply it on her hair. She tried to tighten her grip on it, but the more she did, the more it slid and fell, once into the basin, twice on the floor. Maybe because the water was warm, or maybe because her hands were too soft. Maybe because the soap had a mind of its own, maybe because her mother kept prying the soap out of her hands, which would be impossible of course, because her mother had long been gone a few years after she decided to run away and be free.


"Nobody loves a woman with short hair," her mother would say. "Nobody loves a woman who looks like a man!"


The sun was already out and painting the walls bright yellow. She lets loose on the soap, her eyebrows and cheeks reeking of lavender tears. She rinses away the soap suds and impurities from her hair and decides to look herself up the mirror. Water was still dripping from her short hair. Too short, she thinks. Short like a boy's haircut. She towels off the wetness on her face, her eyebrows, her neck, her shoulders, her chest. The light had created this illusion for her that her hair is a rusty, reddish-brown color, like those of the fairies and wild animals in her mother's stories.


She had learned to live with this illusion of herself - a woman with short hair that nobody loves, a woman who looks like a man because she is.