Souvenir of a Vanquished Self

I am playing with my ponytail, something I’ve done almost every day for the last 10 years. I twist it around my fingers, feeling its heft, its pull. Hair is heavy; it bears associations and memories. Hair is a frame of reference, even a statement of intent. I had long hair through the births of both my children and the death of my father-in-law. I had long hair when it made me seem a throwback, and when it set me on the cutting edge. I had long hair throughout the bulk of my life as a writer, which always made me wonder whether, like some contemporary Samson, my words would leave me were I ever to be shorn. Each time I caught a glimpse of myself, the sight of my ponytail hit me with the force of reassurance, a bit of constancy amid the metastasis of the world.

At least, that’s how it used to be. Recently, I cut all my hair off, emerging with a bristly head of inch-long stubble, and a detached ponytail that I can’t stop playing with. It looks like a hairpiece, like a totem stripped of its power. The loose end (the end that used to run down my back like a thick gray rope) is much the same as it has always been: twisting, curling, small errant strands sticking out at angles. The other end, though, is cut bluntly across the top, a quarter-inch past the hair tie, and it appears forcibly severed, like evidence of an attack.

My friend Suzi, who cuts my hair, suggested that we think in terms of a ritual. Once my ponytail was sliced off, I could keep it as a talisman, a memento of who I used to be. Now, I keep trying to figure out what to do with it. Should I hang it from my wall or put it in an envelope, like the hair from a first haircut? Would I be better off just throwing it away? At my most atavistic, I consider wearing it on my belt, like the scalp of some vanquished other, but then, by virtue of the situation, such an other would have to be me. This may make for an interesting psychological conundrum, yet it also seems like reading too much into things. Or maybe not.

The strangest thing about having short hair is that I no longer recognize my image in the mirror. I’m not talking about the times I consciously observe myself, such as when I’m shaving or brushing my teeth. Or, for that matter, the endless minutes I spend staring at the jagged lines of my haircut, as if, were I to look long enough, the pieces of this bizarre new picture might settle into place. There are, however, other moments, when I sweep by the mirror in the bedroom and find myself caught short by the reflection of a man with cropped gray hair. The other day, I met a woman who told me she’d had a similar reaction when she bleached her hair a few years ago. It’s disconcerting, as though you’re inhabiting someone else’s body--or they’re inhabiting yours. You start to think about who you are, how you define yourself; you start to realize that what we refer to as identity is far more superficial than we’d ever admit.

After all, hair is just an elaborate adornment, a set of peacock feathers that we primp and flutter like the vain little birds we are.

On some level, though, hair is a determining feature, a declaration of our sympathies. For a long time, I was the guy with the gray ponytail, and without it, I can’t quite tell you who I am.

The day I chopped my hair off, a friend told me about someone she knew who had recently received a haircut for the first time in five years. This woman, my friend said, felt her burdens lift with each snip of the scissors, so that when she emerged, it was with a sense of freedom, of having been reborn. I don’t think I’d take it that far. This haircut is simply a way of seeing myself as less fixed, full of unrealized possibilities. Long hair can obscure you; it seems somehow fitting that, at this point in my life, short hair might add up to something of a reclamation, a reconstituting of my place within the world.

So I am playing with my ponytail. This is something I do, something I’ve done almost every day for the last 10 years, twisting it around my fingers, feeling its heft, its pull. One afternoon, not too long from now, I will put the hank of hair away and not look at it again. One afternoon, I will let go of the twinge--of grief? of envy?--that marks me. One afternoon, I will catch a glimpse in some inadvertent mirror, and the reflection I find there will be my own.