Feet + Gummy Candy + Black Hair Dye
With no other guidance, I followed what I knew. I dressed up, formally, in all black, out of respect, and I did my makeup, hair, and put on jewelry and I sat in front of my camera, like everyone else, and projected into this agreed-upon space and time to celebrate my friend’s life. I feel weird about crying inside a Zoom box on display for everyone to see. But it’s respectful to be communal, isn’t it? At points, when I was too overcome with emotion, I turned my camera off and lay on the ground of my office, and let my cheek crush into the carpet. All funerals remind me of the first. I cried in a box then too.
It was in a church in Arkansas, and we were in a special room just off the main sanctuary; all close family was in the box. I was eight, and I was wearing a new dress, and tights, and Mary Janes. The dress was dotted with delicate white and brown flowers and had pearl buttons. I remember being excited about the dress, and my brother had corrected my emotions, “stop being happy.” I fingered the pearl buttons as people in the room sobbed. The sad box shook. I could see my grandfather’s coffin through the glass window in the box, but it was far away. My grandmama was crying so hard there was no sound. Tissues wadded in both her fists that she would bring to her mouth to plug the nonsound. My mother and her two sisters squeezing one another’s hands. I didn’t understand then that she needed to sit with them. I first wrote about my grandfather’s funeral in college as part of a piece of fiction. I did this a lot. Wrote about things that happened as fiction. I was too scared to write about my own experiences without the cover, persona, or lens of an invented character. If I had a character, I was safe. I entered my M.F.A. as a fiction writer. I once turned a story into workshop and listened to my peers doubt its verisimilitude; “It’s not believable, this would never happen.” But it had happened, it had happened to me.
⦿
I am trying to calmly pick up some food for the week but I notice he isn’t just following me, he has a video camera and he’s pointing it in my direction. I am looking for the red blinking light out of the corner of my eye. Is the camera on? He’s not really following me, it’s 2 pm. He’s not really filming me. I try to put it out of my mind. I purposefully lose him in random food aisles. But, when I check out and exit the store, I hear footsteps behind me and it’s him. I try to breathe calmly. It’s a coincidence. When I get to my car, I open the driver’s side door and lean into the car to place my bags. When I turn around he’s standing in such a way over me that I’m trapped. I can’t stand up fully. He leans against my car with his body, holding me there.
“I’ve been watching you,” he says. I start to feel that wild energy of sheer panic crystalize and branch through every inch of my body. I realize he could push me into my car and drive off with me. I look behind him and realize 2 pm at a grocery store in Albuquerque is empty—no one is here. No one will see this. The lot is empty and no one would see me disappear, and more than that no one knows I’m here.
“I want to record your feet, they are so beautiful.” I am wearing my gold sandals with black toenail polish and running would be difficult even if I got past him.
“No. Stop.” I shake my head. I am trying to stand to my full height. Trying to create space between us; push him back. Before I can repeat myself and say it louder, he’s gone. Vanished. I scan around the parking lot and can’t tell which direction he went in, if he got into a car, if he’s hiding behind something. I jump into my car and lock the doors. I let out a scream. I’m still not sure what this man might do with random footage of me walking around a grocery store or my feet in my gold sandals, or if he got any footage of my face — the fear, the expression that came over after he paid me a compliment. A compliment, a way to get more of me than I wanted to give.
One thing I’m learning — the more I write, the more people want me to stop. The more I own my own stories, the more people ask me to lie. The more people want me to say it’s fiction. There’s a lot of reasons not to write. Very few to keep writing.
⦿
Over winter, I visited my parents and cleaned all my stuff out of the attic. I found old diaries, crazy iterations of self, pouring, seeping through pages. I kept diaries off and on from 9 to 20 years old. Staring out of those boxes was my whole evolution, proof of a wild interior life that was never quite captured on the outside, or was often assumed to be less complex. My slow withdrawal from collective life all smashed into pages. The pain of having a self to keep, a self to explore, a self to figure out, a self to revisit.
In high school, I would sneak gummy candy. My preference for it, a secret to my family who thought I preferred chocolate to anything else. When I got a car I could drive myself to the drug store and try any flavors I wanted and no one could stop me. Dots and Twizzlers. I examined many types, many shapes, many colors of gummy candy. A fully private exploration. I would do this before going to my SAT prep tests. I would eat the gummy candy in my car and go into the tests sugar-juiced. Some testing days you could listen to the army of tongue rings clicking against teenage teeth. Classrooms were tongue ring nations back then. The preferred bad kid body jewelry of the 90s. The tongue rings my friends hid from their parents by not eating or speaking for days. Wads of bloody cotton in their swollen mouths, taking it out only to drink Cokes. The healed tongue rings were flaunted at lunch by licking Blue Raspberry Blowpops. The tongue rings that crushes swore made you look like a kinky freak as they breathed on your neck.
I do miss those teenage feelings sometimes. When you’re 16 or 17 and your friends are pieces of art. You look at them, study them, memorize them, absorb them. They could be in your bloodstream and it would not be close enough. Some passages in my diaries are written by my best friends. We were so close, they were allowed inside.
I diaried about dying my hair. The black hair dye was a kind of first fiction, a persona, a separation from the real self that was too soft, too accessible, or was it an attempt to align the outside with the inside? The exterior self looked too soft, and the inner self was screaming through the black dye. My best friend at the time helped me. We bought dye so black it was almost blue and we used an upstairs bathroom in her mother’s art studio. When I got home my mother asked me if I liked my hair. I said “yes,” in defiance, but deep down I wasn’t sure. I woke up in the middle of the night and caught a glimpse of myself in my bedroom mirror and didn’t recognize myself and started crying. In my childhood home, we had a grandfather clock that struck, even in the middle of the night down in the living room. My mother met me downstairs. I was standing in front of the mirror in the living room looking at my hair while the clock chimed. I didn’t recognize this reflection either. “It will grow out,” she sighed as I cried softly.
After that first 24 hours, I owned it. It was me. Black box dye girl. I put silver clips in the shape of hearts in my hair and parted it down the middle. I taped Smashing Pumpkins songs off the radio and sang them loudly. “THE MORE YOU CHANGE THE LESS YOU FEEL, TONIGHT.” When my hair grew out, I didn’t return to the black dye. I have one photo of my black hair in winter of 1996.
I started dyeing it black again a few years ago when gray began creeping in. Watching the dye run down the bathtub drain was familiar but transgressive too. A revisiting of my first fiction, my rebellious self.
No matter what I wrote in my diaries, no matter what was sad, or devastating, or who was revolutionary, and who was a poser, and who I longed for, and who was awful, there are some things your younger self does not imagine. Like one day you’ll be 38 years old, on your knees in your parents’ attic, going through boxes of things your child-self put away for your own future children you actually don’t have. That there is no child at all. That maybe you unconsciously made a series of decisions that took you further and further away from children. That there is more gray hair coming and that children may not be. That you did not wrap anything up for your 38-year-old gray-haired self. You did not think to take care of her. You did not think she might need a message from her teenage self. What she needs is something I’ll have to save for fiction. I’m not ready to own that story yet.
