I feel like a tree

My white hair, my lovely ‘canas’, have made me into a tree

Each cana is a trunk ring. They don’t measure years. They measure weeks. Days. Minutes.
Each cana tells me how time keeps passing on.

Playing to cover them up, to paint them, to disguise them, is no longer a denial game…
It gives them the chance to enact their role as life clocks. As measurers of time

I dyed my hair (pardon, “I bathed my hair in colour”) for the first time last August.
All my canas got drunk on dye. They were welcome (forced into) a hair-carnival, a sparkly parade of artificial colouring. Most of them were dressed in ‘L’Oreal Chocolate’; others – a very selected few- dressed in ‘L’Oreal Gold’…

They joined in with the rest of my hair in this fake colour charade… Some of my standard hair was actually stripped bare, devoid of its natural ‘honey & chestnut’ skin (that’s how I used to like calling my natural hair colour, sorry L’Oreal, you can’t compete with that!!!) and made to look like skinny straws so that they could put on their new chocolate or gold leotards.

And so, for a few weeks, my white hair did no longer exist. My lovely honey & chestnut hair (and a whole brown & red rainbow in between) did not exist either, which made me frown. Instead, chocolate (& some, refined, gold) reined.

Now, a month and a half later, with a snitchy mirror & some minutes in my hands, I have been able to look back into the carnival after-party… and, of course, the whiteys are back (timid at first, I thought, but unstoppable).

But, instead of feeling frustrated and impatient to bring in the l’Oreal brigade to start the costume party all over again, I must admit I have renewed my sympathy for the these few ‘cana’ sprouts…

I have seen time in my hair. I have felt like a tree. My age, my days mapped in hair length. I have liked it. I have decided I won’t feel guilty to force the ‘silver comparsa’ out of this carnival; I won’t feel guilty to get them drunk again on chocolate and gold, or perhaps a bit of caramel and cinnamon (let’s see what the L’Oreal alchemists have in store).

I will have fun making them put on their sparkly (inebriated) costumes… and I will wait to see them emerge back and bring in new reinforcements, showing off their genuine moon & starlight boots under their fake golden cloaks

 *

Time is on me. Time shows off my age, my years, months, weeks and days lived.
Time won’t disappear.

And I will enjoy this hairy dance with it.