Broken Doll

Technically it started Thursday morning. You know how you always comb out loose strands of hair in the morning… there were more of them. A wad of hair about three times as big. But I combed and it stopped coming out and I spent four days pretending to myself that it wasn’t real, that it was a fluke, that it would stop.

So this morning I comb and the wad is that big with every stroke. A handful of hair for each swipe of the comb. And I comb and it doesn’t stop. I comb some more and it’s still not stopping. In the shower strands tangle around my hands and come away in clumps. And I comb my hair again and it’s still not stopping.

So I finally just quit combing.

I somehow got it into my head that this would be a relatively neat process. They told me it would fall out pretty much all at once so I imagined locks of hair falling out in patches… strands I could collect, braid together, hang on to.

But it’s a mess. Tangles, clumps, wads. Hair everywhere. I’m afraid to even touch my hair at all for fear it will just shed out completely, a tangled wispy mess trailing from room to room on the floor.

You can’t tell yet. I’ve stopped combing so it stays. My hair’s a mess, it needs a combing, but I don’t want to touch it. I tried to straighten out some clumps to braid together and couldn’t. I don’t want all of it to end up in some tangled messy pile on the floor.

Tomorrow I will call the wig place and have them cut it off. At least that way I can braid and save some of it. I think I will leave it maybe an inch long. I don’t think I can handle going from long hair to nothing in one leap.

I haven’t had hair that short since I was maybe 5 years old. Even in elementary school my hair was at least chin length. I’ve been growing it out for 15 years, hoping that it would get longer than just past the shoulders and realizing after a while that it just won’t grow any longer than it is.

I can’t even imagine what this is going to look like.