“Ready?”
“Do it.” You hand me the shaver and kneel, facing away from the mirror. After rounds of Nutrafol, you’ve decided it’s time to know what you’d look like bald.
***
When I met you on the ski lift two years ago, the day after the biggest snowstorm of the season, your hair was already thinning. After we followed each other’s tracks down the mountain and rode back up, we exchanged contact information with frozen fingers and promised to meet again over the whooping and laughing below us, adults turned to children, leaping and diving into fresh piles of snow.
***
I ask you to make the first cut which can’t be undone, the gentle vibration clearing a path from your neck halfway up your scalp like the first heavy shovelful after a snowstorm, revealing the Earth still whole underneath. Clumps drift to the floor, coating the tile. We are naked because it clings to everything, but I still manage to step right into a pile of it, my focus unbroken.
***
Twelve years before I met you, your hair was tucked behind your ears by sweat in a technicolor dance club in maybe Berlin, indistinguishable as the last party after midnight. Six years before I met you, your hair tickled your shoulders in the Bishop breeze, revering a rock you never dreamed you could climb (you did, four years ago).
***
Twenty years before I met you, back home, the snow used to pile up for days, blocking the door. My sister and I would wear our pajamas inside out, flush ice cubes down the toilet, sleep with spoons under pillows, then curl up on the couch with cereal to see if the local news would announce our district CLOSED. Small things grew tall and tall became small, hiding away familiar walking paths and constructing stepladders over fences. Palaces emerged from piles cleared off the driveway, serving chocolate syrup sno-cones and guarded by bulbous men with carrot noses and sticks for arms. The snow revealed angels hidden in the folds of our jackets; my sister and I couldn’t believe how big we were getting.
When I grew old enough to help my parents who were sore and tired, my back ached and fingers stiffened from hours bent over shoveling, gripping cold plastic. I used to play Elvis through earbuds to pass the time.
***
We only fight in the summertime. “I’m having a hard time envisioning the future with you,” you confess, and we are both quiet, waiting for the first snowfall to turn the landscape blank, smoothing corners, shrinking shadows.
***
When you pick up your shaved head and look into my face and not at the mirror, your blue eyes blazing under the bathroom LEDs with no cover for shade, I wonder if we should save the soft piles around us as the last shreds of evidence. We were young once, and you had hair.
Your hair now in my fist, your hair that I liked to knit my fingers into while you drove.
***
Snow up to our hips, snow blocking the door, my first dog Charlie diving into feet of fluff, slick as a seal in the cold Oregon sea. Or big and white as an Alaskan polar bear, floating above the ground, sneezing sparkling snowflakes that showered my sister and me.
***
“My love, should we pay for snow removal this year?” you ask me, leafing through bills that appear in our mailbox even though you turn on auto-pay and opt for paperless. The snow never sticks anymore, the winters warm and dry, the summers hot and smoky. THE VANISHING SNOWPACK, the local paper marvels from the top of the mail stack.
***
“My love, does being bald make me look angry?” you ask me, adjusting to your new look as an adult, which, at the age of thirty-two, has taken you by surprise. You look beautiful.
When the last snowstorm comes it will be indistinguishable from any other. Pieces collect in silent piles, things you never dreamed you could lose.
Katerina Smith is a fiction and nonfiction writer from Pennsylvania living in California. She would love to hear from you at katerinasmithwrites@gmail.com, or follow her on Substack @katerinasmithwrites.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Emiliano Grusovin
