Last Word: I Quarantined My Hair Away

It came home brown and wavy. Like it had been for however many years I’ve been old enough to style it like I would my mood: casual, and cool. In fifth grade it exuded the Justin Bieber confidence my peers so jealously dreamed of. On my gap year, last year, per usual, it grew out to the perfect man bun, a look that displayed the carefree, soft-smile vibe I felt myself in the entire time I was away. Most of the year was spent in Jerusalem, but every few months we’d travel. My man bun accompanied me from India to Italy, flowing with pride the entire way. Comfortably spending my parents’ money to post on Instagram with international internet charges, anything to flex the bun, no?

But six weeks ago, just being sent home from school, and being shipped off with my sister— who’d flown home from New Orleans — to a house my parents owned in the mountains for two weeks to quarantine, my mood was anything but casual and cool. This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, repeated in enraged chants in my head the first days out of school. The glorious, finally-spring-time end of my first year in college, gone. The people I’d yet to have that one more meaningful conversation with to cement our relationship, the parties, the prospects. I held my breath. My plans for the summer. I was going abroad, the promise of a messy bun. The frustrations of a privileged teenager, stuck back into suburbia right as he was able to escape.

And so, with my casual and cool mood out the window, the brown and wavy seemed a less than representative show. It felt like a lie, and also, an escape. 

It started with a simple cut, about a week in. My sister’s girlfriend — who’d fled with us into the mountains, and who thankfully had been cutting her own hair since she was a teenager — cut and trimmed the sides of my head until you could notice a difference. A difference, nothing major. 

And then, it began, again. The mirror popping up and pulling me in more often than it’d usually been, constantly looking at my hair, myself, this isn’t you, you need another change. It had been a week since the first cut, and already I was growing tired. Too many hours with nothing to do but rethink and makeover, even for no one to see.

Manifesting my confusion and panic in watching and then rewatching Dua Lipa’s new music videos. That two-toned bleach hair, oh, to die for. I needed it, I wanted it, if I had it, would I too have flawless skin and social distance with Anwar Hadid in some posh London apartment? This time, more extreme measures needed to be taken against my image, that a cut just wouldn’t do. I needed a bleach. Not just any bleach, but a two toned, Dua Lipa style bold-in-your-face look. A ‘do that could be posted on Instagram to the thoughts of many, thinking, yeah, he’s lost it, but in a fun way, like, he’s getting through this with style. Well, as if you hadn’t already gotten this, I wasn’t, but the fifty dollar bottle of professional bleach I purchased under the nose of my Mom’s Amazon Prime account was about to say otherwise. 

My sister and her girlfriend cramped around me in the upstairs bathroom as I waited the forty minutes after rubbing the bleach through my natural, confused brunette strands, they had no idea what was coming. Only on the top half, only like Dua. I’m sure I’m good enough at knowing hair to figure this out. Just make it look like it’s unnatural but in a natural way, eh? 

But that it wasn’t. No, it was floppy, and chopped, and stark, and a bunch of other words to describe how my hair now looked like I had dipped the top half in neon orange paint. Only the top half. I forgot to buy the shampoo you’re supposed to put in afterwards that accounted for the brassiness and turned the orange to silver. I forget, of course, and was left with half a fruit on my head. 

And, yes, as my hair was descending into chaos, so too was my mood. Or maybe it’s what led me to such a fateful place, if I’m being honest, too delusional in my isolated state to think maybe it wasn’t a good idea to base my masterpiece off a celebrity who clearly had an actual professional perform the makeover. One who didn’t forget the shampoo afterwards. While mine was DIY, and scary, and sad. 

There went my edgy-chic Instagram post, my Hail Mary into doing this stay-at-home thing with style. Stupid idea, that the torture chamber of my anxious thoughts with only myself around to tell the difference between smart and grotesque, could produce such pop star level glamor. 

It seemed that now, or then, three weeks ago, half my head of hair on fire, I’d finally returned to where I’d started out, I’d been styled to my mood. Only now, that mood being crazed, and absurd. 

For two weeks I walked around my house, and my Zoom classes, with my head burrowed beneath a hat, or a hoodie, or just the dark, anything to hide my monster. Only close friends seeing the disaster I created through FaceTime, or anxious snapchats, please don’t judge me, or in a way to at least make myself quirky out of all of this, quarantine really knows how to fuck with my head, literally. 

And then, after weeks of thinking, and over thinking, how do I get out this mess? I pulled the razor out of my Dad’s bathroom drawer, and shaved it all off.

It was finally gone, my orange nightmare. But the bigger one, the one that started this spiral into almost baldness in the first place, still so ever present. Just nowhere else to go, at least on the top of my head anyway. Where else can I take out this anxiety? Maybe my room, I always wondered what it’d be like painted black.