How to give yourself a haircut:
Step 1. Decide you want a haircut. Wonder who that person is every time they walk in front of a window, a mirror, a camera, and wonder why they’re following you.
Step 2. Buy hair clippers at half the price at an ocean state job lot because you are forty thousand dollars in debt working toward something that still feels like nothing. Ignore that the gas to drive the extra ten miles further than target probably equals out the price.
Step 3. Eat a cold turkey sandwich in the bathroom while your friend who promised to help you complains about their partner who is giving them everything they want but don’t realize they hate. Feel weird that you know why. Wonder what they know about you that you don’t yet realize about yourself.
Step 4. Plug the damn thing in, and wipe the crumbs from stale sandwich bread off your chest. That too isn’t right, but a pair of clippers for those are much too expensive and complicated and are not sold at the ocean states job lots 30 minutes from your home.
Step 6. Console your friend who is nervous on your behalf.
Step 7. Let your friend console you when you shave off the first bit and you realize it’s too late to go back. It’s just hair they say. It’s always just hair. It will grow back if you don’t like it. Don’t worry about not liking it. Worry that it won’t look straight.
Step 8. Strain the muscles in your neck as you reinvent yourself. Spend the most time on the parts behind the ears, toward the nape of your neck even though you will never see it. Spend fifteen minutes sandwiched between two mirrors and wonder why you don’t cancel out standing between them. Feel the clippers buzz against your scalp and rattle your brain. Wonder what else it might rattle loose.
Step 9. Stare at the hair in the sink for too long and regret not putting down a garbage bag to catch the scraps of you.
Step 10. Feel your friends’ hands rub over your shaved sections. Feel their fingertips that are cool and cold against the warmth of your skull and how they don’t tangle in the longer bits. Remember the longer bits that you kept because not keeping any of it also felt wrong somehow.
Step 11. Dunk your head under the faucet because your shower head still isn’t working even after several calls to the person who is supposed to deal with that. Feel the cold water on the back of your neck. Dunk under it three times. Become a clean slate before the god in your head. Know that it is your divine right to not feel the hair on the back of your neck. Get the collar of your only clean shirt soaking wet. Spend the rest of the afternoon in a too tight sports bra.
Step 12. Go to your evening class in your damp shirt and see that someone has dyed their hair neon orange and gelled it into a mohawk. Laugh at the god in your own head, but thank them for driving you to ocean state job lots too.