Dark Blonde

I am seated at the Unicut, settled in the red pleather captain's chair. My glasses have been removed. My body and clothes have disappeared under a generic black smock. I am just a head now, in a foreign country where I don’t speak but still need. My head is a fresh sprout bounding up from a mound of dirt.

I look unruly and need to look like I understand rules and can fall in line with them, whether true or not. I feel now in my modern world that there are rules for rebellion even, that the only parts of me that can’t be categorized are what most will never know and not see. These are also my favorite things about me; they are not secrets. I think this time in human history places limitations on most people's desire to know each other. We can know so much that we forget to ask what people want us to know about them.

I tell the stylist I want a short haircut. I tell her that I trust her. There is a moment of swoon between us because how often do you get to tell a stranger that you trust them and mean it? The language barrier doesn’t matter. Her English is pretty good. Haircuts can only look so bad on me, no one is really looking. I won’t be ruined if it gets too short. No one is really looking.

The scissoring begins, and I fall away into myself, visioning how good I will look with less, satisfied that I have navigated into getting what I set out to get. In a moment of pause, the stylist says something to the other stylist. I note the stillness in the airspace above my mind.

She returns. I look up and smile when I hear the buzz of the clippers resume.

“This is my favorite part,” I say growing taller, craning towards the pleasure of the buzz. Some fine artistry will make me more than I am. I open my eyes out of fantasy to see all three stylists, the entire Unicut staff, present behind my chair.

“Do you dye your hair?”

“Um. No. No, I have never dyed my hair.”

I have often been asked what color I will dye my hair when I start dyeing it as I age, but I’m never going to do it.

“Oh yes, this is good. The color of your hair is very good.”

“Brown?”

“No. It is what we call dark blonde. Some copper, almost, so there is the shine of blonde. But no yellow. Dark.”

The other stylists nod. It would seem, as she continues to buzz, my stylist tells the others I have never dyed my hair. There is a quizzical look and perhaps the bowing of two chins, an honor, and then it is back to work.

And I close my eyes again to vision this version of myself, not me with a haircut, but me with my newly earned identity. Dark Blonde.

I have never wanted to be blonde. Blonde would be a misrepresentation, much too close to lying. Blonde wouldn’t let it be known that honesty is the foundation of all virtues.

Dark blondes are Film Noir heroines, but not femme fatales. I imagine a fiction with my haircut cape on because the protagonists of all the classic Noirs I like are men. But as the buzz continues, I sweep through the night about and around the brutalist architecture of Berlin, taking two lovers and writing ten novels never to be jaded and always to be starring, flawed as I am in my picture.

Dark blonde means you could have more fun, but you’d rather do it alone.

Dark blonde is laughing with a mouth of blood. It isn’t red lipstick. It’s road rash from the words spilling out at about a thousand miles a minute, each more important than the last. Not frivolous. Velocity is at a pivotal point.

Dark blonde is reflective, puddling light in the night season from the glow of even a single fairy bulb strung out to create a festive feeling.

Dark blonde is dangerous, letting us know that death is coming without subtlety. I haven’t got a gray yet, but when I do, I wonder if I will be asked how I earned it. It will increase my value. Copper and silver, each tucked behind an ear, accruing the wealth of living without trying but likely with suffering and joy.

When I pay at the counter, it likely seems weird how thankful I am. How could I put a price on seeing myself in a whole new way?

I go to one of the six banner nightclubs in Berlin. I didn’t pack for clubbing, because I don’t go clubbing. For fun, I attend bonfires in large fields or talk loudly on the street after the theater. However, I figure I will go dance in a club after being told by a number of people that it’s unlike anything I’ll experience elsewhere. These clubs are fun even if you don’t drink. These clubs are safe for women to go to alone.

I’ll try. If I am turned away because I am wearing hiking boots and a holographic raincoat, I will happily go home and read in bed. When I am finally at the front of the queue after cracking jokes with some jaunty Austrian fellows, the bouncer greets me. She is the spitting image of Marlene Dietrich and it makes me sweat to look into her eyes.

I face her in my full dad-booted glory, my gold tooth and my glasses gleaming.

“Beautiful,” she says. “that is a great haircut.” And the dark blonde breezes into dance.