#8 | hair
A few months ago, I found a trans chinese barber with whom I immediately felt at home. Nobody ever told me how nice it would be to just step into a salon and describe my desired style in terms of masculine or feminine. My first appointment with him was at a pop-up at a queer owned cafe. I had imagined that we would do the cut indoors, but he wound up moving a stool out front and did the cut outside. It drizzled a little; it was beautiful. People stopped and looked in amusement and admiration when walking by, and for some reason I didn't mind.
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The past few weeks my world has broken. I suppose that the entirety of the past year has actually been the world breaking, slowly, but last week it finally collapsed on itself and washed away. My partner lost a parent and needs us to break up so she can heal on her own.
I guess I shouldn't really call her my partner anymore. But this is really challenging my idea of love. She's someone that needs space and total individuality to deal with pain. Most people's idea of love is to endure everything together, but what if you're someone who needs to reduce all friction just to stay afloat? I know that I'm her best friend still, but that our relationship is too intimate to be weightless to her in this moment, and this moment could be months, years, or forever.
The truth is that I love her beyond love. It's a convoluted, gay, and perhaps desperate way of thinking, but in my head, respecting and accepting this decision without anger or resentment is something I'm only able to do because I love her. I love her in all forms: a girlfriend, a friend, a living being. Am I permitted to, when she says she doesn't feel anything right now for me except for care? Am I allowed to interpret her decision as an act of love itself, to end this before we possibly build resentment during this difficult period of her life, instead of clinging and diving in deep together? Is it that she doesn't trust me in particular to go through it together, or that she doesn't trust anyone?
My idiot brain continues to think about her in a lifelong fashion. It's bargaining with the idea that we'll figure this out, that this separation is what I'm providing as a lover, that she'll eventually wade out of her ocean of grief and find me still waiting, patiently.
But what does it mean if we're not under this label of a 'relationship' anymore, with no guarantee that we ever will again? In recent years I haven't cared so much for a label anyway. She cannot see the future past the next day, but I can. And with that ability, am I really to listen to her words and forget about her entirely? Sometimes when I see engagement/wedding posts, I get a momentary pang of envy at the idea of a legal promise that you'll never separate, something that traps you financially. aha! A burden that keeps you together. What's this idea of forever, though, when it's never actually been a healthy way to stay together? Do people need to formally be a couple every day of their lives to love each other 'truly' and forever? Is that really the definition of a union? I don't think so, but maybe the world really is that simple and I'm just in denial. When you love someone, sometimes what you have to do is let them go and find themselves. Maybe forever, maybe just for a while. I don't really know. If we never come back together, if I move on eventually, does it mean my love for her wasn't real after all? She was barely able to form the words for why she needed to be alone, but I understood. I cried so much looking at the east river that morning and wished I could hold her hand.
I do feel like my feelings for her have always transcended the of romantic love. We've always been separate humans rather than one whole. I loved her as a friend first, for years. My heart is hurting a lot; she's such a big part of why I am the way I am. She's why I finally understood my sexuality and my gender.
When the pandemic started, I cut my hair above the ears. She let me be ugly and figure out my short hair journey. She always said it looked good, but I felt ugly. I spent two years growing it out again and in recent months had been asking her if I should chop it off once more. She said, it would look good, but I remember you were so insecure back then. When she broke up with me, I cut it again, in my head saying, I can do this. I'm secure, I'm confident, I'm patient. I just commit to going back every month.
I told my stylist about the breakup. He told me that after he and his ex broke up, after a time of on-and-off again talking, they randomly went to Six Flags together on the last weekend before the Kingda Ka coaster would be demolished. They had a wonderful day, silently realized and accepted they were incompatible, and then never spoke again. He gave me a hug and tears welled in my eyes. I went home, stepped into a hot shower, cried and ran my hands through my hair and felt the absence of what used to be.