Invisible Women

Women & Names 1

A cut. Not a trim, but a cut. A simple cut. And then, it is different. It’s all different.

The woman down the hall has cut her hair. We used to call her Barbie, back when she looked like Barbie with all that hair, all blonde and everywhere. We thought her head was a bonfire of blonde, there was simply so much of it. We used to snicker when she walked by, bleach swallowing the whole room, but it wasn’t bleached, no, hers was natural and it illuminated dark rooms with adequate reading light. When she walked by, we would imagine ourselves under all that weight, the way it must have hurt her neck and given her migraines. When she walked by, fresh from the shower, beads of water still translucent along the bend of her slight curls, we would want to yell, to stop her, for surely, she would catch pneumonia going out like that. It would kill us if she were sick. We couldn’t handle it.

But that was before. That was when she was Barbie, back when she still had hair, back when her skin was perfectly cooked and tender, back when she wore mini-skirts, ball gowns, and drove a pink Corvette. But that’s not the way things are now, and even though we watch her with interest, we hate her. We hate her for taking away our joy.