The ammonia reek of boxed hair dye clots in the air, clings in bloody rings under my fingernails for a week. I’m always too impatient for the gloves. The way they tangle and overflow my fingers, a barrier too thin to be satisfying. I let the cool muck of the dye settle in the creases of my skin, my lifeline a sudden red wound. Lucie Brock-Broido writes: “The rims of wounds have wounds as well.” I am walking—writing—in circles.
I darken or lighten my hair by a shade every few months, whenever the itch for change overwhelms, becomes another body living in my body. I crave a synthesis of within and without. I browse the shelves of CVS like I’m looking for a patron saint, a golden icon to frame and hang on the wall. Am I brunette this winter? A redhead again? Naturally, I tend toward a drab dark brown that lightens in the sun. But there’s something better, something earned, about choosing the shade myself, even if it only mimics my own pigment.
Sometimes I pay a woman to transform me. It becomes its own curious ritual. Hair plastered to my head with wet and foil, the book of swatches full of funereal strands of fake hair. The Victorians trimmed their dead for earrings, necklaces, the only adornment widows were allowed. I finger each lock. Point to 1RB. That one. Leaving, I pretend I’ve become someone else, walk the streets downtown like I’ve never seen them, the sun’s glint off each strand limning the afternoon gold. There’s no nerve there, nothing living, but the image of me sharpens. All the static seeps out.
The bathtub will need to be bleached before we move, splattered dye still ghosting sepia around the edges like the shoreline after a storm. In a movie I watch late at night, too stoned to move, a strange organism spat up from the sea devours anyone who breathes it in, bodies swallowed in bioluminescence. The corpses an archipelago so blue it aches. Sometimes in the morning when I wake my first thought is: what is growing inside of me today?
I dye my hair before the last surgery—bright flag of surrender—even knowing it will go greasy and brittle in the week I make a bed do my moving for me. Sometimes I don’t move at all, give myself up to stillness. When a nurse pulls an IV out too quickly, blood spurts, stains my gown into a new, brighter geometry. I can’t stop staring, mesmerized by that breath of color in a place so sterile the air dries out the bloom of my lung. I spit up pressed flowers, crystal rings of pineapple, newspaper clippings gone yellow with age.
For Halloween one year in college, I go blonde, bloody up a pink dress ringed with feathers. The paint seeps through to my bra, mottles my skin, but for that night I don’t care, am delighted when someone points to my tacky plastic crown, yells—“Carrie!” Later I will crawl into the washing machine in the basement, contorting my limbs to fit, laughing spurts of smoke, leaving lipstick rings on M’s neck. I’d shown him the movie the week before, but the Wifi sputtered halfway through, leaving Carrie stuck on loop in the gym showers, the water long gone cold enough to numb.
I brought a warm, shimmery cinnamon brown home from the drugstore but haven’t touched it all weekend. Instead, I nursed the kind of hangover that makes me fantasize about digging my brain out with an ice cream scoop. Carmen Maria Machado, writing about Promising Young Woman, notes complaints and critiques center around the fact that the film offers “nothing new.” Nothing new in the terror and boredom of grief. Nothing new in the fact that the only justice we offer our women onscreen is in dying. I dye my hair to make myself new. Like putting lipstick on corpse. In the movie, when Cassie handcuffs her dead friend’s rapist to a bed, he calls her insane. “You know what,” she says, “I honestly don’t think I am.” Then he kills her. He’s arrested, not for the rape years earlier, but for killing Cassie when she demanded a confession. Cassie, who’d given up on moving on, on the lie of recovery everyone tried to sell her, served as the vessel of the vengeance she’d longed for. Maybe this should vindicate. But it hurts, sometimes, that even in our revenge fantasies, we don’t get to walk away. That centuries after Chopin’s Awakening, we’re still walking into the waves.
“Bad guys get killed in every goddamn movie ever made,” Callie Khouri said. People were pissed the would-be rapist in her film Thelma & Louise was killed in a parking lot. Would his death have felt more earned had he finished the job? If Louise hadn’t found him holding Thelma down and felt the years between her own trauma and this new wound narrow and collapse into nothing? Did he deserve to die? Who fucking cares? Most of the wounded don’t deserve what the world’s carved out of them. The dead are unfinished things. They can’t redeem or damn themselves. I don’t know if the living can, either, or if our freedom is a tracking shot cut short before the car hits the ground. The momentary salvation of flight—“I didn’t want anyone to touch them,” Khouri writes—in the air, arcing towards infinity or ending, no one can.
Here, I should catalog my wounds for you. Parse them into patterns of being and meaning. Instead, I’m thinking about Amy Dunne cutting and dyeing her hair in a gas station bathroom. Smoking a cigarette while the color sets, dousing the floor in bleach, and collecting her cut hair in a zip-loc bag. Amy, a character catapulted into the public lexicon for the monologue she drones over the same scene. Rosamund Pike’s glittering, clipped vowels hitting like bullets: Nick loved a girl I was pretending to be. He can’t—or won’t—see her, so she fakes her own death, leaving him with a plausible motive and blood all over their kitchen floor. She hurtles through the world, injured and angry, demanding the world suffer with her. She’s the villain. Allowed her selfishness and monstrosity in part because even blood-stained and staggering, she radiates the frigid entitlement of the rich, white, and untouchable. She’s Venus on her shell, emerging from the sea strewn with viscera. And Nick? Somehow, I still find it in my heart to hate him more than her. He moves through the world not caring what he breaks, leaving wreckage in his wake, never doubting that life owes him more more more. In this, maybe, they are a perfect match. He cares too little, though, while Amy cares too much, and my sympathies will always tend towards the latter. If only because I like to believe my excess could one day be forgiven, or if not forgiven, at least shot in a forgiving light, in technicolor with an expensive score.
I control so little about my body. This has almost always been clear to me. It is easy, satisfying, even, to say I dye my hair because it is a small but certain demonstration that I own the vessel I walk around in. It is just as true to say I started coloring my hair because I was bored, because I wanted to be noticed, or because I’d harbored a secret, silly desire to be redhead from the first time I watched The Breakfast Club and fell in love with Molly’s halo of curls. Or was it the way she wore her self-consciousness—defiant, blushing, with a shrug and a tearful smile? If only I could doubt that prettily. I blotch like ink on paper, my skin blooming in angry red rash. I always liked Brian more than Bender. I read that even off camera, Nelson continued to pick at Molly, call her Princess, maneuver his body into her space. She wrote it off as “method” according to gossip sites, but I think of the boys who used to pinch and poke and chase me, aiming spitballs down my shirt where they would lodge, sticky and wet, under my back brace. I remember the angry notes I would write and then tear up, a child’s messy script reading: YOU’RE DEAD YOU’RE DEAD YOU’RE DEAD.
In Tony MacNamara’s The Great, Elle Fanning, playing Catherine, says: “There’s something inevitable about me, even to myself.” Kerry Greenwood, describing the protagonist of her detective series, writes: “Miss Fisher was about to happen to someone again.” I’m obsessed with these women who seem to happen to the world, rather than letting life happen to them. Part of it’s the fantasy of power, sure, but it’s not just that. When I’m at my most depressed, I feel incapable of action, a marionette puppeted through my days by some unseen pilot. But I also feel inevitable, a natural disaster, like something that’s been inflicted on those I love. When Catherine calls herself inevitable, she’s speaking lightly, half-joking. She means it as a good thing—she spends most of the second season, though dealing with assassination attempts, an uprising, war, pregnancy, and a country and people deeply entrenched in their ways, insisting she can change things through sheer force of will. The same season finds her abandoned by her closest advisors, betrayed by her mother, and sobbing on the floor of her throne room, the only person willing or able to comfort her the husband who tried to kill her.
A psychiatrist tells me, “You put a curse on yourself when you were born.” I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a metaphor or a joke, so I laugh. But I’ve always been prone to magical thinking. If I did enough sit-ups under the dim, blue light of my alarm clock, my spine would hold steady, wouldn’t shift those final few degrees that meant surgery. If I dye my hair, if I remake myself, I can slough off the unholy mess of a girl I am and become something different, something new. I can stop happening to myself, stop acting out the same sordid plots. People are sick of the Sad Girl. Of the trauma novel. Of the confessional. I don’t blame them, I’m sick of her too. I can’t get rid of her, though, not without getting rid of myself, and I have too many things to do to die. I learned to live with her instead. That maudlin, tawdry natural disaster. I walk when I can and turn the shower as hot as it goes. When the credits roll, I’m not a corpse or a crashed car. I dye my hair the color of coffee when the mornings get cold again. I haven’t hurt myself in years.