I still remember the specific pain of having a clump of hair tugged so hard that I felt infinite stabs in place of follicles. When I was little, my mother would battle my brown tangled curls with the sturdiest brush that we could buy for under five dollars. Every morning I sat criss-cross applesauce on the edge of my faded white Disney princess comforter with a flat back and folded hands, like a tea-party debutante, waiting for my mother to force my hair into a neat little ponytail or pigtail braids. The process was anything but composed.

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Some days, I could hear the ripping of my hair, like a shredding rope instrument used to create an agonizing shuffle-brush, shuffle-brush beat that I couldn’t dance to. Some days, I just heard the brush handle split and felt the weight of the bristles velcroed onto my scalp. Some days, the room reverberated with my feral yowling as I writhed underneath her firm hands. She never heard any of it. Instead, she saw my small fingers contorting over and over into the same two shapes, getting faster with each yank. Thumb on my pointy- O. Pointy, middle, ring fingers up- W. O-W. O-W. O-W.

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She can’t hear the rattle in her exhale when she coughs. The sound shakes in and out of existence weakly, an image blipping up among TV static. With every crackle in her voice, another picture floods my screen. She’s in a blue cotton half-sack, held together with twill tape ties, and her scarf is a circle of bandages stitched by surgical tape. Her mouth is in a troublemaking curve when she giggles, wiggles her eyebrows and pulls up her paper gown to reveal her upper thigh in the empty examination room where I translated her biopsy. When she tells me the news, I look into her eyes and I think of my topaz birthstone necklace I got the year I turned eight, stuck underneath the faucet when I tried to clean off the rust. A gooey black poison is rooted within her chest. The blight latches on and swallows her up just like how my dominant hand chews up the body of my flat left palm- all my fingers curling and folding into a fist- as I learn the sign for the first time: CANCER.

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I draw my ponytail across my face the same way I used to hold my stuffed animals inside a four white-walled box with a cut-out looking into the living room. Sitting in my asylum that passes as a bedroom in a college apartment, I think over and over of her. She’s 110 miles away in the New England small town that is Farmington, Connecticut. Except that 110 miles feels like a 3,395 when you’re surrounded by buildings that take up miles of space on their own, reaching towards a filthy sky that hides the wishing stars from millions of New Yorkers like me.

 

I think of her when I curl my hair to go out dancing for the night. Having my hair just-right was so important to me when I was sixteen and going to prom for the first time. She did my hair herself, delicately pinching the soon-to-be-ringlets between her long nails and pressing it against the iron. Sitting still proved difficult for me, and I often ran the risk of burning the tips of my ears so that I could multi-task or turn my head for a lip-read conversation. I think of her when I pop in a piece of spearmint gum, the kind that I used to steal out of her purse before I had an income of my own. Once, I tried to make the biggest bubble I could by chewing a whole pack of her gum. My hair got stuck on the fly-trap surface of the big green bubble and the more I tried to pull it out, the more entrenched the sticky wad became. With a little peanut butter and gentle coaxing under the shower, my mother saved the day, no scissors necessary.

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I hated cutting my hair. For me, each long lock was a branch falling down, shaking when I danced and picking up leaves when I laid flat on my back to stare at the autumn sky. I thought of my mother when I walked down into the Astor Place hair cuttery, tucked underneath a vitamin shop. Each wisp of buttery hair that fluttered to the ground made me think of our negotiations when she used to cut my hair herself. Only an inch, I pled. Don’t cut it at all. She pulled out the ruler and snipped as little as she could while getting rid of my split ends. The mirror below Astor Place held me in an unfamiliar way, showing the Eastern-European stylist behind my craning neck, and his frowning lips trying not to smile as they formed the words KEEP STILL. I pulled out the ruler and measured it, twelve inches. Just enough to make a wig.