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i sit in an enameled tub bubble wrapped in drops of water sticking to me like dewy summer sweat. this perpetual humidity has my scalp exhausting invisible fumes; the heat leaves my body like microwaved air. i've been sitting here for hours, i think.
you walked in a while ago looking for something. was it me? you're on your knees now, hoping i'll walk out of this monochrome abjection, but you know I'd rather mull it over in water holding the shape of me,
thick and heavy. the white bathroom- light glimmered over me as i sank, my hair in flow, still in liquid space, gravity immobilized, bubbles of struggling breath bursting at the surface. i couldn't feel my eyelids.
you drained the water, but the pain sits in me as i sit before you: unwilling. my hair is damp, musty by the roots. torn off strands collect in dirty spirals over drainage. can you smell the rotting fibers, the zinc and chlorine?
you wash my hair as i sit in this hurt, hold the showerhead over me like a halo, the water in interlude with my tears. down they roll in smelted gold and silver along the porcelain cracks in my face. your hand in my thin-stranded head of hair feels nice: gentle, heavy; raven hair, wet, suddenly thick with glistening shampoo gliding down my split-end tips conjoined by water.
run your tepid fingers down my shy back, along the rubbles of my spine. you feel them, don't you? feel me as i hang my head by my sobbing throat. my boned shoulders jolt from the choking gasps for air over sharp echoing cries into the rounds of my knees, pressed against my mired clay cheeks.
hold me like water. there's no gratitude left for me to give, yet, you hold me, like water.
i forget how much i've aged beyond seventeen. but my hair hallows time as it frails, fades, and falls.
hair, i must say, with the lump in my throat pulsing, is the bridge before sweet paradise where sinner's fall at the knife-thin cross, down to the forlorn pit. i belong there in the burning abyss, where my skin will melt like wax against bone before disintegrating into ash.
part of me does wish you would do me this honor of choking me by- by a wirey strand, pull against the sliver of my neck. let me suffocate by my hair before it breaks. do me this last great favor, won't you?
you wash my hair, rinse it clean. dry, run a comb through it as it breaks away from the roots, cascading down by your fingers in loose ribbons. wrap me in your toweled embrace. dry me. braid my hair. we play tug of war.
image: Hong Chun Zhang. Life Strands. 2004. White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, Sydney. https://www.hongchunzhang.com/long-hair?lightbox=image1dws.
