Scissors

I scrape my nails across your scalp and your hair bunches between my fingers. Relaxed into my touch, head lolling, skull heavy in my hands, I hold you, loving the heat of your skin, the coolness of hair, the way it tickles the backs of my hands as scratch into your nape. Burying my face, scent of shampoo and skin.

Hair. Tricky subject for me. Currently blocking two writing projects. I have read and digested the psychology of identity and perception and past trauma and none of it makes any difference. Cutting hair, either in real life or here in this alter ego, is difficult.

It’s not even like mine is some sort of crowning glory. It is dyed improbably red and hangs in a slightly limp almost style down to over my shoulders. In the past, it has been both nearly to my waist and cut so short most of it was done with clippers. 

Colour doesn't bother me like cutting. I love the fun. Stepping out into a new tribe at Eroticon I could see I was not alone with this. I love the bold pinks and blues and purples worn by Emily-Rose and others who I admire and prefer to be anonymous in this community. The discussion of whether red heads have more fun with with Rose (and we do). The fantastic long white hair, the dreads, and all the other combinations I saw in Camden all statements of confidence. Every two months or so I go back to the hairdressers and beg for them to send it royal blue. I make do with extensions because they're reluctant to bleach it, but it makes me feel like some sort of wannabe. If it's ruined, cut it off! 

When it is short, I am relaxed. I like it in a style that is all in the cut, mainly because I don't have time for a hairdryer in my life, let alone straighteners. Especially a style that makes a statement. I think it speaks of confidence and of someone who can make decisions. This is who I need to be in my real life. Last year, I let it get a little longer for an evening out where I wanted to look “ladylike”. Just long enough for a beautiful up-do. Now it has reached the awkward “just long enough to call long” length. It looks nice, but you can tell how I feel about it from the description above. Six or more inches too long yet I can’t bear the thought of it being cut. But this is ridiculous. It grows quickly enough that this is only one year since the last time clippers cut my nape in close and sharp.

It’s not sensory dislike. I think it is purely the social message hair provides. I wanted to be ladylike. I want to look decisive. I want to be sexy. And I want my hair to convey all of those messages, because I am none of those things. When I write about hair, I write the hair I want. The reaction I want.

I'm a man of numbers, spreadsheets, logic, sitting in an office, staring at a computer screen. A geek. A nerd. Aiming for nothing more challenging than to not be alone. I guess I'm a romantic underneath, confused as to just how much to try to say aloud. To be more than an avatar or dismembered voice from the speaker. Channelling my inner James Bond; hoping for Brosnan not Moore. But when I needed him, when I saw a fall of straight dark hair across the office, his voice fell silent. I began to struggle to think anything more than the most basic images and feelings. Want. Need. Fuck.

  And that was was just your hair. Just a fraction of you. I need that voice now, with you, more than ever. Too many things I can't put into words. Things that are just not manly enough to let out of my mouth. Things I'm scared will drive you away. My inner poet is frustrated with the lack of words. So I will start where we started. Your beautiful hair.

I've always been a sucker for hair that trails across my chest, hair I can grab as I thrust into a sweet mouth. This was fantasy hair. Hair that made the world tilt on its axis and changed my chemistry till every hormone focussed on you. My phone rang and I had to turn away, stare back at the screen of my computer and try to convince my dry mouth to function. Reality rushed back as oxygen to suffocating lungs and despite the hum of my body I answered that call, and the next, and the next.

That night I fisted my dick to the imagined softness of that hair between my fingers, the slight resistance of neck muscles matching the tension in my hips, both of us trying to avoid my natural urge to thrust deeply and feel the wet tightness of a throat closing on my sensitive tip.

Anticipating a next glimpse near the coffee machine, perhaps diamond sharp cheekbones or smudgy dark eyes, I thought about the colour, the cut, every detail that could possibly elicit more clues. Smooth hair falling over sharp shoulders in a strictly tailored jacket, dark mocha brown with caramel hints. I've nothing against colour, but there is something in the confidence of leaving it natural that is more appealing to me than bright dye, or worse yet uniform mundanity. I wanted it to be paired with milk white skin and burning, intense eyes. Ice blue, if you can cope with the mixed metaphors, but then I told you I was a frustrated poet. Maybe the caramel hinted at something warmer, but the beauty of dark hair is highlighted in the contrasts and I visualised something virginally pure perhaps spotted with the occasional dark freckle.

Blunt cut and thick, with beautiful movement. Unfussy. No fringe, I thought, one length that would run through my fingers like silk through a loom, weighing heavily against my hands. I closed my eyes and imagined cradling the weight of skull and brain, the fragility and sculpted strength slack and satiated against my belly. No make up, naturally dark lashes I could hope might match the cocoa and caramel hues. A mouth rouged by friction, glistening with my spunk.

Because of my fear, I’m sure, hair cutting has become eroticised for me. I am torn between the sick feeling if I see hair hitting the floor, and the squirm in my stomach that sends me looking for video clips late at night. Cutting the hair of my fantasies. Cutting the hair of characters I create.

I could understand it if I was forcing them, but right now both of the characters are complicit. They want their haircut. It is me that doesn’t.

My first character is a female who wants to shed the confines of expectation she has created for herself with a very traditional femme packaging, ice-queen platinum hair included, which needs to change up to a pixie cut. She is exhausted by shaping herself for others and the hair is part of that. It needs to go, and the scissors that cut it will be sharp, easily shearing through the thin slivers that hang limply from her scalp.

Second character is a man. He’s been rocking androgyny, but now wants something that better reflects new confidence in his sexuality. He’s worried his partner loves his hair more than him, but really knows this is stupid. I know it’s stupid, as I am crafting their ending and the hair that is vital to the plot is unimportant by then. Blunt kitchen scissors wielded by his partner will crunch and saw and pull through his ponytail, just below his shoulders. He may well go to the hairdressers afterwards and have it cut shorter, emphasizing his cheekbones and fantastic eyebrows.

Hair is a fragment of these characters, but at the same time is crucial to their development.

I have armed myself with first-hand knowledge. Clippers wielded, articles read, scissors sharpened, videos watched. I can feel the slightly slippy but at the same time crunchy feeling of scissors cutting through hair. The vibration of clippers. The soft tufts of hair falling away and rolling down a body like tumbleweed. Dead and gone. The feel of cool air on the nape of your neck. The stranger in the mirror…but was that before or after the cut?

It’s not about me though, is it? I just need to detach enough to get on with the writing.