Sometimes You Have No Control

My dad ran over a guy on a bike. We were in a van and he was backing it up, but then he saw my cousin, so he lifted his body half-way out the window to wave and shout. He didn’t see the biker behind us. I yelled for him to stop, but he didn’t.

He wasn’t really my dad. It was just for a moment that he was. Then he was just a man, a younger guy I hardly knew, which is relieving, because my dad would never do something that idiotic. The bike rider disappeared after that, so in my mind he got away. I think this happened as a parallel to the squirrel I almost ran over yesterday. I came to a screeching halt in the middle of a busy road so that he had time to decide which way to go. My heart pounded hard. I felt like crying.

I sat in the van with some other people I didn’t know and we drove to a place I was unsure of. No one talked about the biker. I willed him to have gotten away unscathed.

My Dreams Tell Me How It Is

When you regret the choices you made in the past, when you hurt someone you wish you hadn’t, your dreams won’t let you forget.

More hair

Every night this week my hair has been different, and always longer. Last night it was still short on the sides, but the rest down my back, bleach blonde underneath that I noticed only when I flipped it upside down to make a high pony. Then a bun on top. Then two little braids in which, suddenly, it was too short for and the braids unravelled. This made me want to cry, but I didn’t. I knew I had a lesson in patience. There is always a lesson.

I am not me with long hair. But I want to be. I’m ready to be. Everything grows in the hair, so slowly you can’t see until one day you realize you can make a ponytail. You can make something else. You can be something different. Or you have arrived on another side. It’s just hair and then, how different and the same it makes us. We talk about hair too much. I like it.