HOW TO SURVIVE A BREAKUP: SHAVE YOUR HEAD.
MONICA PRINCE
In the fall of 2012, you move to Milledgeville to pursue your Master’s in Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing with a focus in poetry. You live with three white undergraduate girls in a four-bedroom apartment within a complex akin to a resort in Mexico. You keep to yourself: two out of the three girls are virgins (one already engaged) and the other is a chemistry major (so you never see her, though her drinking problem rivals yours). You clean your dishes, lock your bedroom door, and do yoga in the living room while they’re in class, your relaxation music cranked up in your headphones.
Every weekend, you untwist your hair and perform maintenance: wash, co-wash, condition, deep condition, trim, stretch, detangle, retwist. In total, depending on the week (maybe you didn’t have to deep condition this time, so that saved you forty-five minutes), you spend about six hours every weekend on your hair. Just to keep it looking clean and out of your face. Your hair is long now--from the top of your head, it stretches to just below your earlobes--and is much healthier than it was when it was relaxed for those ten years after the divorce until spring break 2009. But you can’t devote six hours a week to your hair. You can’t do anything while you work on it but watch Netflix or talk on the phone. And though your mother appreciates the hour-long calls every Sunday, you can’t do homework, read, or write while twisting and retwisting your 4b curls into something presentable.
Don’t focus on the white supremacy that insists your hair look a certain way to be considered presentable or beautiful. Don’t dwell on the issue of Black hair not being enough in its natural state, big and fluffy and fro’d out. It will make you cry. You’ll write a poem about it before you graduate, so save it for then.
You wake up one Saturday in September, and your twist out from the evening before has turned into a feisty jungle of split ends and tangles. Serves you right for passing out instead of wearing a bonnet to sleep. You have an uncontrollable urge to shave it all off.
This will be the third time you’ve done this. The first time, your sister insisted. “Get used to what your face looks like,” she said, citing Rihanna as an example of bravery. You did it. Made an appointment with your mother’s bald hairdresser (who championed your choice loudly and lovingly), came back to campus after spring break your freshman year and felt like a warrior. A self-conscious, scared, sexually assaulted warrior.
The second time was about a year later in August. You were about to leave for Senegal for the semester, studying abroad in Dakar. Your mother insisted you cut it again. “How will you take care of it?” she asked. You didn’t know. You knew nothing about Senegal--just that they spoke some French there, and there was a high chance your people came from there during the slave trade. You didn’t research the country at all. Just submitted the application and bought the plane tickets. You never considered this reckless--just adventurous. Saying yes. Acting without panic or pressure. But you cut your hair as instructed by your mother. You were only twenty. You wouldn’t have time to think about your hair while learning a new language and trying to find your family history in the walls of slave houses and on Atlantic shores.
This time, you stand in your bathroom for a long time, staring at your face. You wonder if men will still find you attractive. You wonder if you will still find you attractive. You wonder if you will get more done with the six hours a week you plan to save.
It’s just hair. It’ll grow back.
You wash your hair in the shower, dry it half-heartedly, and get dressed. You drive to the Milledgeville Mall, a nice way of saying eight stores, and beeline for the hair salon. It occurs to you as you cross the threshold of this establishment that you are Black.
The three white stylists available, all chewing gum, reading US Weekly or cleaning their fingernails, flatly refuse to shave your head. They don’t touch your hair, thank God, but they refuse to cut it. You plan on giving one of these women money to drag some measly clippers across your scalp. Shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes. No one will budge. A fourth stylist, busy with a customer, offers to do it in thirty minutes, but you’re afraid you’ll lose your nerve if you wait that long. You leave and drive to Wal-Mart.
While writing your name down on the wait list, it occurs to you that you could do this yourself. The first line of a poem pops into your head--when the hair stylist refuses to shave your head, do it yourself—and you drive to Sally’s Beauty Supply. The clerk is elated at your decision.
“Good for you!” she says, taking you down the aisle toward the clippers. “I bet you’ll love it! Low maintenance, and it’s been hotter than usual this year.”
You spend forty dollars on clippers, a brush, and huge hoop earrings. Back home, you dump everything out on the bathroom counter and blast music. You record the entire thing, as if talking to an audience of naturalistas cheering you on as you do your third big chop.
While preparing--changing clothes, cleaning the sink, choosing a playlist--you make sure you’re doing this for the right reasons. You’re not cutting your hair to subvert the male gaze or white supremacy. You’re not doing it to call more attention to yourself, but that is an added bonus to your attention whore personality. You’re doing this because you want to be someone else for a while. You want to be the bald one for a while. You want to take control of your life from this point forward. No more making decisions for a man—one who won’t marry you, especially—or for a life path you don’t want. You won’t become a teacher just because that’s what everyone expects of you. You won’t have long natural hair just because that’s the alleged goal of all Black women everywhere. You will cut your own fucking hair and then you will get drunk in public, celebrating your warrior status.
Keep in mind that you’ve never used a pair of clippers before. Your only experience is when your father cut your brother’s hair when he was very little--maybe six?--and he nicked Noel at the base of his skull. There was more blood than you expected. Noel didn’t cry, but he didn’t speak while your father tried to repair the damage. This memory flashes in your mind as you set the clippers on a setting you assume is probably fine and start shaving.
One day, you will learn measurements. You will know fractions better than you did in high school, when you barely passed that test. You will know that 5/8” is much smaller than 3/4”. One day, you will ask for help, or at least use the Internet to figure out exactly how low you should set your clippers when just trying to cut off old hair and reveal new growth.
That day is not today.
Rather than start from the back of your head (so, you know, if you fuck this up, you can still wear a headscarf or something), you start from your forehead and just start shaving. You sing along to the rap playlist on your computer. You build a little bush of dandruff-infested curls in the sink. Somehow, you don’t notice your natural curl pattern appearing beneath the clipper teeth, the calligraphy of your hair follicles dancing as you cut. You keep singing. It’s as if you’re not in the room anymore, as if you’ve blacked out during this entire experience.
This phenomenon of blacking out during sober activities? It’ll keep happening. It’s a side effect of the (how many is it now? Four?) rapes and sexual assaults you’ve suffered since you turned eighteen. Your brain shields itself from harm in this way. It’s not that you don’t remember anything; it’s that you leave your body and go somewhere else. Like while Andrew forced himself inside of your drunk self, you were really dancing on the set of Moulin Rouge while the Duke spun you across the ballroom floor. It will take five years to notice this coping mechanism, but right now, as the clippers remove clumps of Black hair, your brain sends you elsewhere.
You shave yourself nearly bald. You can feel your scalp. Your head feels like your legs eight hours after you’ve shaved and worn jeans instead of a skirt. For a minute, you panic. Are wigs expensive? You remember that guy in college who asked if you were a lesbian now, and how your friend slapped him. You remember that same friend telling you after the second big chop that you looked like a cancer patient. You wonder if any of those natural hair care blogs have DIY wig tutorials.
But there is nothing to be done now. What’s done is done. You push all that panic down, where you keep any and all insecurities related to your body, your race, or your abilities as a writer, and clean the bathroom. You take a bunch of pictures, wash your skull, and reenter into the world.
When you call your mother the following week, she laughs and congratulates you. Tells you she wishes she was as brave as you.
Every weekend, you untwist your hair and perform maintenance: wash, co-wash, condition, deep condition, trim, stretch, detangle, retwist. In total, depending on the week (maybe you didn’t have to deep condition this time, so that saved you forty-five minutes), you spend about six hours every weekend on your hair. Just to keep it looking clean and out of your face. Your hair is long now--from the top of your head, it stretches to just below your earlobes--and is much healthier than it was when it was relaxed for those ten years after the divorce until spring break 2009. But you can’t devote six hours a week to your hair. You can’t do anything while you work on it but watch Netflix or talk on the phone. And though your mother appreciates the hour-long calls every Sunday, you can’t do homework, read, or write while twisting and retwisting your 4b curls into something presentable.
Don’t focus on the white supremacy that insists your hair look a certain way to be considered presentable or beautiful. Don’t dwell on the issue of Black hair not being enough in its natural state, big and fluffy and fro’d out. It will make you cry. You’ll write a poem about it before you graduate, so save it for then.
You wake up one Saturday in September, and your twist out from the evening before has turned into a feisty jungle of split ends and tangles. Serves you right for passing out instead of wearing a bonnet to sleep. You have an uncontrollable urge to shave it all off.
This will be the third time you’ve done this. The first time, your sister insisted. “Get used to what your face looks like,” she said, citing Rihanna as an example of bravery. You did it. Made an appointment with your mother’s bald hairdresser (who championed your choice loudly and lovingly), came back to campus after spring break your freshman year and felt like a warrior. A self-conscious, scared, sexually assaulted warrior.
The second time was about a year later in August. You were about to leave for Senegal for the semester, studying abroad in Dakar. Your mother insisted you cut it again. “How will you take care of it?” she asked. You didn’t know. You knew nothing about Senegal--just that they spoke some French there, and there was a high chance your people came from there during the slave trade. You didn’t research the country at all. Just submitted the application and bought the plane tickets. You never considered this reckless--just adventurous. Saying yes. Acting without panic or pressure. But you cut your hair as instructed by your mother. You were only twenty. You wouldn’t have time to think about your hair while learning a new language and trying to find your family history in the walls of slave houses and on Atlantic shores.
This time, you stand in your bathroom for a long time, staring at your face. You wonder if men will still find you attractive. You wonder if you will still find you attractive. You wonder if you will get more done with the six hours a week you plan to save.
It’s just hair. It’ll grow back.
You wash your hair in the shower, dry it half-heartedly, and get dressed. You drive to the Milledgeville Mall, a nice way of saying eight stores, and beeline for the hair salon. It occurs to you as you cross the threshold of this establishment that you are Black.
The three white stylists available, all chewing gum, reading US Weekly or cleaning their fingernails, flatly refuse to shave your head. They don’t touch your hair, thank God, but they refuse to cut it. You plan on giving one of these women money to drag some measly clippers across your scalp. Shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes. No one will budge. A fourth stylist, busy with a customer, offers to do it in thirty minutes, but you’re afraid you’ll lose your nerve if you wait that long. You leave and drive to Wal-Mart.
While writing your name down on the wait list, it occurs to you that you could do this yourself. The first line of a poem pops into your head--when the hair stylist refuses to shave your head, do it yourself—and you drive to Sally’s Beauty Supply. The clerk is elated at your decision.
“Good for you!” she says, taking you down the aisle toward the clippers. “I bet you’ll love it! Low maintenance, and it’s been hotter than usual this year.”
You spend forty dollars on clippers, a brush, and huge hoop earrings. Back home, you dump everything out on the bathroom counter and blast music. You record the entire thing, as if talking to an audience of naturalistas cheering you on as you do your third big chop.
While preparing--changing clothes, cleaning the sink, choosing a playlist--you make sure you’re doing this for the right reasons. You’re not cutting your hair to subvert the male gaze or white supremacy. You’re not doing it to call more attention to yourself, but that is an added bonus to your attention whore personality. You’re doing this because you want to be someone else for a while. You want to be the bald one for a while. You want to take control of your life from this point forward. No more making decisions for a man—one who won’t marry you, especially—or for a life path you don’t want. You won’t become a teacher just because that’s what everyone expects of you. You won’t have long natural hair just because that’s the alleged goal of all Black women everywhere. You will cut your own fucking hair and then you will get drunk in public, celebrating your warrior status.
Keep in mind that you’ve never used a pair of clippers before. Your only experience is when your father cut your brother’s hair when he was very little--maybe six?--and he nicked Noel at the base of his skull. There was more blood than you expected. Noel didn’t cry, but he didn’t speak while your father tried to repair the damage. This memory flashes in your mind as you set the clippers on a setting you assume is probably fine and start shaving.
One day, you will learn measurements. You will know fractions better than you did in high school, when you barely passed that test. You will know that 5/8” is much smaller than 3/4”. One day, you will ask for help, or at least use the Internet to figure out exactly how low you should set your clippers when just trying to cut off old hair and reveal new growth.
That day is not today.
Rather than start from the back of your head (so, you know, if you fuck this up, you can still wear a headscarf or something), you start from your forehead and just start shaving. You sing along to the rap playlist on your computer. You build a little bush of dandruff-infested curls in the sink. Somehow, you don’t notice your natural curl pattern appearing beneath the clipper teeth, the calligraphy of your hair follicles dancing as you cut. You keep singing. It’s as if you’re not in the room anymore, as if you’ve blacked out during this entire experience.
This phenomenon of blacking out during sober activities? It’ll keep happening. It’s a side effect of the (how many is it now? Four?) rapes and sexual assaults you’ve suffered since you turned eighteen. Your brain shields itself from harm in this way. It’s not that you don’t remember anything; it’s that you leave your body and go somewhere else. Like while Andrew forced himself inside of your drunk self, you were really dancing on the set of Moulin Rouge while the Duke spun you across the ballroom floor. It will take five years to notice this coping mechanism, but right now, as the clippers remove clumps of Black hair, your brain sends you elsewhere.
You shave yourself nearly bald. You can feel your scalp. Your head feels like your legs eight hours after you’ve shaved and worn jeans instead of a skirt. For a minute, you panic. Are wigs expensive? You remember that guy in college who asked if you were a lesbian now, and how your friend slapped him. You remember that same friend telling you after the second big chop that you looked like a cancer patient. You wonder if any of those natural hair care blogs have DIY wig tutorials.
But there is nothing to be done now. What’s done is done. You push all that panic down, where you keep any and all insecurities related to your body, your race, or your abilities as a writer, and clean the bathroom. You take a bunch of pictures, wash your skull, and reenter into the world.
When you call your mother the following week, she laughs and congratulates you. Tells you she wishes she was as brave as you.
HOW TO SURVIVE A BREAK-UP: SPONSOR A CHILD IN AFRICA
MONICA PRINCE
"...specifically South Sudan, if they'll let you."
You don’t do this. Something about sponsoring a brown child on a continent you probably came from feels wrong.
Instead, you sign petitions and donate to the Girl Scouts of America and Planned Parenthood. You round up your change to fight MS and support ending world hunger at the grocery store. You slow down in work zones and adopt a pug.
Genocide triggers your tear ducts. You watch The Devil Came on Horseback in 2007 and cry for three days. You watch Beasts of No Nation in 2015 and cry for another three days. You write letters to your senators and representatives. You research until your fingers bleed, your ears bleed, your eyes bleed. You can’t save anyone with your words. You can’t save anyone with your letters or statuses or shares. You can’t save anyone.
This feeling will never go away. It started in 2003 with Arcelia, a beautiful Mexican girl in your seventh-grade Home Economics class. She’s dating a high school sophomore who leaves hickies on her chest, neck, and abdomen. You know she’s being abused, but you don’t know how you know. You’re only thirteen. You can’t put it into words yet, or ask her to break up with him. You don’t know what statutory rape is, or what coercion looks like in someone else. In eight years, you’ll possess the vocabulary necessary to address psychological and sexual abuse; you’ll be trained to see the symptoms in others because you’ll know what they look like in yourself.
But for now, you just have this beautiful girl in front of you, telling you this boy loves her even though sometimes he calls her names, even though sometimes he chokes her while they make love, even though sometimes he stabs out his cigarettes on her thighs. You haven’t had your first kiss yet, but she’s having sex. You want to learn from her, be her friend, finally get the cool points associated with sex and puberty, but part of you wonders if it’s consensual. If there’s something wrong with a sixteen-year-old dating a thirteen-year-old. If you should tell someone.
You should have. You should have saved Arcelia. Should have asked her what it felt like when he kissed her--did it hurt? Did he leave bruises out of love or anger? Did she actually enjoy it, or just believe she should?
By the time you write this essay, you won’t know if you like it either--sex, you mean. You don’t know if you’ve just followed your societal conditioning, or if you really like submitting to men. Only two have ever hit you, and when it happened the first time, you gave yourself a bloody French manicure clawing at his throat. The second time, you said nothing.
That’s how it happens, you see. The first time the reaction is violent; the second, not so much. By the next, you like it. Like whore hurled in anger or sexual gratification; like finding money in your shoe for cab fare or a job well done.
Arcelia adds you on Facebook while you’re in college—she’s in a relationship with someone with no connection to that now-demolished middle school, has a baby girl, supposedly happy--so you never ask her about those days back in seventh grade, if she recovered. You haven’t. You know you never will.
Instead, you sign petitions and donate to the Girl Scouts of America and Planned Parenthood. You round up your change to fight MS and support ending world hunger at the grocery store. You slow down in work zones and adopt a pug.
Genocide triggers your tear ducts. You watch The Devil Came on Horseback in 2007 and cry for three days. You watch Beasts of No Nation in 2015 and cry for another three days. You write letters to your senators and representatives. You research until your fingers bleed, your ears bleed, your eyes bleed. You can’t save anyone with your words. You can’t save anyone with your letters or statuses or shares. You can’t save anyone.
This feeling will never go away. It started in 2003 with Arcelia, a beautiful Mexican girl in your seventh-grade Home Economics class. She’s dating a high school sophomore who leaves hickies on her chest, neck, and abdomen. You know she’s being abused, but you don’t know how you know. You’re only thirteen. You can’t put it into words yet, or ask her to break up with him. You don’t know what statutory rape is, or what coercion looks like in someone else. In eight years, you’ll possess the vocabulary necessary to address psychological and sexual abuse; you’ll be trained to see the symptoms in others because you’ll know what they look like in yourself.
But for now, you just have this beautiful girl in front of you, telling you this boy loves her even though sometimes he calls her names, even though sometimes he chokes her while they make love, even though sometimes he stabs out his cigarettes on her thighs. You haven’t had your first kiss yet, but she’s having sex. You want to learn from her, be her friend, finally get the cool points associated with sex and puberty, but part of you wonders if it’s consensual. If there’s something wrong with a sixteen-year-old dating a thirteen-year-old. If you should tell someone.
You should have. You should have saved Arcelia. Should have asked her what it felt like when he kissed her--did it hurt? Did he leave bruises out of love or anger? Did she actually enjoy it, or just believe she should?
By the time you write this essay, you won’t know if you like it either--sex, you mean. You don’t know if you’ve just followed your societal conditioning, or if you really like submitting to men. Only two have ever hit you, and when it happened the first time, you gave yourself a bloody French manicure clawing at his throat. The second time, you said nothing.
That’s how it happens, you see. The first time the reaction is violent; the second, not so much. By the next, you like it. Like whore hurled in anger or sexual gratification; like finding money in your shoe for cab fare or a job well done.
Arcelia adds you on Facebook while you’re in college—she’s in a relationship with someone with no connection to that now-demolished middle school, has a baby girl, supposedly happy--so you never ask her about those days back in seventh grade, if she recovered. You haven’t. You know you never will.
MONICA PRINCE recently received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing with a focus in poetry from Georgia College & State University. Her work has been featured in The Shade Journal, The Sula Collective, The Rain, Party & Disaster Society, MadCap Review and the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly. She was recently named the 2017-2018 Poetry Fellow at Susquehanna University. She currently writes, performs, and works in Denver, Colorado.