2024

Snip. 

I winced.

Snip. Snip. Snip.

Shit!

​

The plastic-handled pair of kiddie scissors snapped in two, its dull blades utterly defeated by my thick split-ended tresses. One half remained in my grip, while the other lodged itself in my hair. I scoured the house for another pair.

​

My hair had not been cut in exactly three years. The silky black mane that almost reached my ass had long served as an overt signifier of femininity, a curtain to hide insecurities. Maybe, I had thought, my long, luscious locks might make me worthy of a glance from just one of the infinite lanky, freckled white boys who populated my school. They did not.

​

I was tired of my hair clogging the drain when I showered, getting soaked when I washed dishes, falling onto my palette when I painted, nearly igniting when I cooked. My hair grew into an increasingly unwieldy, increasingly impractical appendage – it literally gave me headaches. I decided I needed a grand symbolic gesture to mark my inauguration into adulthood. Something about excising the past.

​

The day I turned eighteen, I intended to shorten my hair by a foot, but ended up accidentally shearing off twenty-three inches, thanks to my fumbling fingers and the shitty hot pink scissors intended for kindergarten crafts. The last time I had hair this short was in preschool, when the Snip-Its employee majorly botched my bowl cut, leaving me with a heinous spiky bedhead, jagged microbangs, and a root beer Dum-Dum for consolation. My mother vowed never to return thereafter; she would be the one trimming my split ends for the next decade.

​But now the scissors were in my own hands.

With a choppy, lopsided bob hovering above my shoulders, I barely recognized myself. Something about new beginnings.

​

I packed the four pigtails, each two feet long and segmented by tiny black hair elastics, side by side in a Ziploc freezer bag. They looked eerie and alive, like some kind of deep-sea eel that slithered through the blinding dark. I sent them off in a brown kraft envelope to a nonprofit in Michigan that creates wigs for children experiencing hair loss.

​

The day I turned eighteen, I opened a Roth IRA and an HSA, invested in six index funds, applied for a credit card, and created a PayPal account. I had earned a six-figure income that year, thanks to a brief blessing by the social media algorithms that led thousands of people to buy my art.

​

The previous year had given me my first taste of independence. With my classes fully virtual (i.e. fake), I was less of a high school student than an entrepreneur. I took orders and managed inventory through my own website, packaged my paintings in makeshift boxes constructed from surplus Costco and Amazon cardboard, shipped them out from the little post office in Town Center to destinations as far as Australia and Iceland. I churned out painting after painting, video after video, in my cobweb-infested basement with the collapsed and leaking ceiling, determined to make Apollo subdue Dionysus, determined to imagine my own utopia in this apocalyptic landscape.

​

But the biggest contributor to my independence, by far, was the near-liberation from my mother. Miraculously, she was no longer breathing down my neck every second of every day. In fact, I rarely saw her at all, even though we were quarantining beneath the same roof during a global pandemic.

​

When Covid hit, something within my mom snapped. She had been a supernova, an explosion of fiery heat, until she collapsed into a black hole, emptier than empty. She shuttered her biomedical startup, packing up the lab and transporting it to our basement. The microscopes now suffocated in shrouds of plastic, the beakers that once held reagents and buffers now collected dust and mouse droppings. She transformed into a nocturnal creature, unhinged from time itself. The rising sun was her bedtime lullaby. In the dead of night, she spent her waking hours lying in bed or on the couch, clutching her iPad to scroll through free Chinese novels downloaded from sketchy websites, cocooned in a turquoise fuzzy blanket, haloed by an ever-growing pile of wrappers and used tissues and fermenting mango skins and a graveyard of sunflower seed exoskeletons. 

​

She didn’t have the energy to yell at me anymore. She didn’t have the energy to clean the sink basin encrusted with mold, or to fix the upstairs toilet that broke, or the downstairs toilet that broke, or the gas stove burner that broke, or the washer and dryer that broke. She didn’t have the energy to cook, or run the dishwasher, or take a shower, or brush her teeth, or show up to the previously scheduled surgery to remove the painful growth on her foot that might be cancerous but hopefully not.​ She stopped cashing in the child support checks, stopped filing her taxes, stopped paying the bills. Twice, we had our gas shut off due to missed payments, which meant no stove, no oven, no hot showers. God bless space heaters and microwaves.

​

The fangs of the raging beast had eroded down to squishy, impotent gums. She was too broken to break me. I still feared her, but even more, I feared for her. 

​

At least I knew she wouldn’t kill herself – she had to live, for her son. Her beloved son, her favorite child. Her son, whose deductibles she still had to pay and whose medicine she still had to inject and whose doctors she still had to fight.

      “If Jamie didn’t still need me, I probably would’ve ended it all by now,” she informed me one day as I passed through the kitchen while she stood idling at its counter, reading her Chinese novel, transfixed like a moth to her iPad's illumination. She waved a dismissive circle in my general direction. “You don’t need me anymore.” 

The day I turned eighteen, my brother said happy birthday, my mother said nothing. I was an adult now, two months away from leaving for college on the other side of the country. My bones itched for the new life that lay beyond those three thousand miles.