Rooted

Today, my hair is jazz— wild coils improvising in the wind, syncopated with no apology. It scats when I walk, riffs when I laugh, and plays the truth off-key because it knows perfection never wrote a song worth singing. Yesterday, it was a sonnet: tight bun, precise, each strand obeying metre, a form I wore to keep from unravelling. There is comfort in structure, even if it strangles, even if it silences the wild in me. Blowout days mean confidence, glossy, straight, as if I’ve smoothed over every crack in my voice. But don’t be fooled— sometimes silence wears a shine, sometimes the most composed are the ones unravelling inside. When grief came, I braided it into my scalp, a crown of patience and ache. Each plait a prayer I didn’t know I was saying, a slow weaving of control over what refused to stay. My fingers worked like monks, copying sorrow into scripture— faith in motion, faith without answers. I dye it pink when I need to scream without opening my mouth— a neon flare of defiance, a riot bottled in candyfloss. I’ve been burgundy in heartbreak, blonde in reinvention, green when I needed to feel anything besides invisible. I shave it down when the world feels too loud— when my scalp needs to breathe, when I crave the unfiltered truth of being raw and unbeautiful. It’s like clearing the static from a radio that’s lost its station, listening for the silence underneath the noise of trying too hard. There are days I leave it uncombed, unapologetically wild, because healing is messy and I no longer care to pretend. Some knots are earned, some tangles are sacred. My hair remembers every hand that touched me too roughly, and every hand that lingered just long enough to soften the story. Don’t ask why I change it. Ask what it’s saying. Ask what I’m trying not to say aloud. My hair is my composition— a score of moods, an orchestration of memory. It is mourning, reinvention, a hymn, a scream, a truth that begins at the root and rises without permission. Every strand a line of poetry I was brave enough to grow.