a trim
I've started cutting V's hair. Or, rather, I've done it twice - the first time I didn't have any tools, and I was nervous and precious so it stayed quite long. We've upgraded the scissors but still don't have a comb, which means I'm working a bit blind. I've been following a YouTube tutorial in which the man never speaks, and we've watched it enough times now that I'm starting to be very curious about him, this nameless bathroom model. He looks depressed. It's easy enough, I think, although I have no idea if I'm doing it correctly, only that Vic's been very kind about the whole thing. I'd like to say he asked me to do it because he trusts me implicitly, but we both know it's more inertia than anything else. I like it, though, the experience. He has beautiful hair, heavy and silky, and I enjoy the feeling of tenderness, the intimacy of searching out the shape of his skull, holding it in my hands.
He's gone this weekend at another conference and one of the things I notice when he goes away is how differently I move through space when he's not here. I'm very precise, very delicate, I won't say graceful because it's miles from that but I become extremely particular about everything. I place my mug deliberately on the coffee table, let my hands linger on a stack of books, lining up the corners just so. I don't know if it's because I can keep my space the way I want it when he's not in it, ordered, tight lines, or if I just notice the absence and how much room I have to move in, or if it's something else - my body becoming mine again when there isn't someone around to touch it. He and I are very greedy with each other, me much more so, always nipping at his shoulder or the soft part of his palm. I'm proprietary, really, and captivated. It drives him batty, how I'm always picking at him, the things I notice - the patch of peppered skin he missed when shaving, the unruly eyebrow hair, the clogged pore. He goes bananas, not undeservedly so. But I can't get enough of his face, his whole self, and I feel so gleeful about it, so hungry, his a far more exciting vessel than my own.
I've been thinking about bodies a lot lately; age does that. Today a friend brought her baby to book club, a little jellybean of a thing, and though I know it's poor form I hogged her anyway, carrying her around, putting her to sleep in my arms. Babies don't understand themselves as separate, can't conceptualize their wholeness and borders until 6 months old; they don't recognize their faces in mirrors until after a year. I think I have less a maternal instinct than a consumptive one. Yesterday I dropped into my yoga studio for a 10-minute trial reiki session. She was nice, this woman, but she's also studying shamanic drumming and talked about power animals and I was having a lot of trouble. I lay under a white sheet and listened to a man outside who was hiding in a box and singing a song about Dumbledore to a throng of enraptured children. She touched various parts of my body - laid hands on - and told me my throat and sacral chakras were blocked, indicating I needed to be more creatively expressive. Hence the newsletter. I didn't feel much, to be honest, except discomfort - I didn't like not being able to see where she was doing, what was happening to my body. All of this energy moving and chakra shifting, the idea that she can know something of me that I can't, me who has inhabited this shell for 33 years. Afterwards I was very chatty, though, wanted to talk to everyone, kept kneeling down to pet dogs and whisper in their ears, "You're so stupid, shut up, how did you get so perfect?"
I think it's supposed to be sensual, cutting hair, but really it's just clean up.
radically consuming
- Scott & Bailey, a BBC detective show. Lots of lady coppers and British idiosyncrasies. The Guardian complained that all the men on the show are caricatures, buffoons, so maybe that's why I like it so much. It's honest.
- Jessie Reyez's EP, Kiddo, is my summer soundtrack and it should be yours, too, and no, this is not the stage name of a former member of One Direction. You can start here.