Your father wants to cut your hair, but I like it long. Certain characteristics which later might cause issues – the double crown, its thinness – are masked once we pass the point where it can be tied in one of your sister’s elastics into waterspouts or devil horns. Only when I go furrowing, letting my fingers trace your scalp, do I get a glimpse of the moles you have there and I remember, try to commit to memory (again) the thought, ‘We need to keep an eye on those’.
When your hair is long, I sometimes sit and watch and try to get a sense of the future you in a way I don’t when it’s shorter. What will you look like, how will your features shift, how many more freckles may we expect, what scars and blemishes are in store? In this future, who will you allow into your life to stroke it as I do? Who on earth will be that lucky? Who will you have those ordinary conversations with, every six weeks or so, sitting over the breakfast table, as I do with your father, when I lean over and run my fingers through his hair and he says ‘I know I need a trim’ without prompting.
It’s not terribly evocative, I know. Or exciting. But it is also strangely comforting. Perhaps one day you’ll understand.
