(no subject)
"For example, I know this girl whose real hair color is a complete mystery to all who’ve met her after the 6th grade. She’s an anything but average girl with stubby little limbs and breast that could smother an elephant. She went to the same public school as I did, took all the same classes, and never allowed herself to be pushed out of a conversation. A real tough cookie…whatever that means. But the only thing about her that fascinated me was her hair. Every time she got angry she would dye her hair. And believe me you she was angry a lot. Oh jeez, this girl worked herself up about every little detail and sure enough the next time I saw her she had a brand new shiny head of hair. The funniest sight was after we all got back from winter break. Everyone could tell how badly her vacation had been from the sight of her head. Oh man, every color of the rainbow was worked into the big rats nest of what she called hair; she looked like a retired circus clown. That was another funny thing about this girl. She did nothing else to her head but dye it. Dreads had long since taken over her pretty little curls but she didn’t care whatsoever. Sometimes I wondered if she even noticed the colors she picked out in the local grocery shop. I just imagined her with one of those shopping carts, her head barely reaching over the top of push handle, dumping row after row of permanent woman’s hair dye into her huge cart and then stacking them later row after row into her medicine cabinet back home. I used to laugh and say “that girl’s rage blinded her so bad she couldn’t even see the color dye she was reaching for when she wanted to change her hair.” Everyone got a good laugh out of that one for a while. That phrase lasted almost as long as people’s interest in her habit. I mean, there are only so many colors you can choose from in a small little grocery shop. Besides, after a bit, all her colors started blending together to form a shit-brown that I guess will never wash out. Even her clown colors faded after a week or so and people don’t have much of an attention span anyway. I still like to think about her from time to time though. If not to try to squeeze out some kind of drop of meaning to absorb into my own life then to poke fun at her for a bit. I think about where she is now (some huge city where the stores are lined head to toe with those little fake locks of hair that indicate the kind of color in the dye box). But then I think about how everyone in high school had forgotten about her after her hair blended together and I think about how people in big cities are used to every goddamn shocking thing this human race can come up with and I decide that she’s probably just a regular girl after all, grown up…maybe with a boyfriend and steady job. So she’s really not all that different than she was when she was in elementary school except that her curly, light brown hair is now stained and knotted past recognition, which (in my opinion) makes her a hell of a lot uglier than she could have been. So in reality, she wasn’t extraordinary at all, and my jealous ceased after I realized that the angry girl with the hair was not some legend that would live forever, but a troubled teenage girl whose (I found this out years after) mother had died in some less than tragic way and all the times we thought she dyed her hair out of anger, she actually did out of sadness from missing her mom; some kind of personal therapy, I’d guess. And so, as it always goes, there happens to be a reason for everything and I'm still left wondering if anyone at all is truly unique."