Who's laughing now?

A woman who understands her hair understands herself. Am not talking about length and volume here; as I experience my hair for the first time I am also starting to understand myself much better. It’s almost as if my hair is everything about me. When I plait Bantu knots without moisture it breaks. It needs olive oil to gloss and honey to hold. My hair is many things, just as I am many things. It’s kinky and breaks all the time when its ignored. I do not like to be ignored – first time I admit it. I remember reading a cancer horoscope that said cancer’s hate to be ignored and even as much as I do not believe in the stars determining my course of action this resonated with me. I quickly stopped reading for fear that  I would start believing. I have an ego as big as my hair, but it needs to be humbled, nourished and made beautiful. Whoever heard of an ego looking beautiful? This is where mine is headed. Half of my hair is one type and the other is another. My back hair which you probably would not see when you looked at me, is curly, soft and grows faster than the front half; which is most of what I am. On the front I am as complicated and hard as my front half hair. On the back I am soft and curly, with a tender disposition – you have to get to know me to understand this side of me.

Apparently we should never lose our childish enthusiasm and everything will come our way.  He said to her that she should stop being so sad because if she kept this way he would be forced to make love to her and yet he had never cheated on his wife before– under the Tuscan Sun. Are men driven by sadness in a woman? Or is it just as warped a concept as my mind perceives it to be. A lady in Mid-Somers Murders just sneered at her extremely religious sister Harriet, ‘I have never understood how you live your life, when it is dead you pray for it and when it is alive you criticize it.’ Her sister could not get along with a single soul. If you keep on wallowing you will never be happy. I want to move to Italy after I have lost sixty pounds, find a house, learn French, eat so much pasta and write for a year. After this I want to move Morocco and eat so much meat and vegetables, learn Arabic for four years and raise my daughter there. Have an open house with no walls. And I can only be happy when I have a large kitchen – I believe the kitchen is the soul of the house. If a kitchen is dull and cold, the whole house will have the same spirit.

Nothing in life is regrettable. One of my friends is being sweet on me. I am as vulnerable as my hair right now. Searching for what makes it come alive. Any instant gratification could be considered the right thing, so I will hold off. Keep trying various products until I find the right now. It has to be natural, like honey. Yet honey alone is not enough to make it healthy, I need to come up with the best ingredients to make it healthy. I can’t afford to settle on the first man that expresses warmth to me or the first man I let myself look at. I should know better than to do this. No matter what happens the Tuscan movie says; always keep your childish innocence it’s the most important thing. An ex always called me naïve. He thought he was insulting me. Who laughs now? I wonder what my baby hair was like. In most of all my childhood pictures save for one, I did not have hair on my head. I have never had the chance to know my hair like I have never had the chance to know me. You never take away what is natural. You should never run away from it. We do. I have done. We black women run away from what is natural. We straighten our hair and add artificial pieces to it and get overwhelmed with the unnatural and ignore the natural. When this happens we lose us. We forget that our natural hair is in alignment with our hips, lips and breasts. That if we had straight hair it would cover the curves of the breast and hide the beauty of our lips. That to have our hair growing upwards is to defy gravity, to be pulled up rather than weighed down.

You know how that movie ends, “you know they say they built the railway line from Vienna to Venus before the train was made because they knew that one day it would come.’ Then you know the movie is about Faith. I am a dreamer. A small message makes me create a world. I have created many worlds in my head. Maybe it’s really possible to read too many books and imagine that life is purer than it really is.