Cleaning Out My Hairbrush

 Three years ago my hair was in knots. 

I wasn’t just having a bad hair day. I had chosen, consciously or subconsciously, to forgo brushing my hair in order to focus on my one priority at that time: getting drunk. I always had a sweaty beer and a menthol in my hand as I traipsed around Riverside park. I wore my hair in one of those messy buns on top of my head, like an athlete or a ballerina would (but I had a completely different occupation (you could say I had the job from hell)). It was easy to wear it that way, as it kept of from being burned by a lit cigarette, and really I’ve never been a girl to wear my hair down a lot; I don’t have enough good hair days to wear it down, and I do have “puffy” hair. It’s been confirmed: I have thick hair. And it was about medium length then, cause I don’t recall having a hair cut in a while. The last cut I had I did myself in 2021, buzzing the back of my head and trying to do a short bob with bangs. I butchered it and it looked like crap, but I can laugh about it now. So, it had finally started to grow back out to a decent length.

And I began to ruin it again. 

I can’t tell you the psychology of the not brushing my hair. You could take it as a marker of just how drunk I was. I  can’t say it’s because I didn’t have time, because I had all the time in my trailer park world. Now as I recall, there were times when I brushed it out, when I realized the shape it was in and I nervously combed it out of fear. But days later it would turn to crap again. And then the job of it was just too much and all it took was a good buzz to forget about it again, and leave it in a wet mess.

I was walking through the rain a lot then (now there must be psychology on that), and you know how often it rains in a Florida summer. It was my form of a shower (though more like a whore bath), as I’d given up proper washing. And I was trying to cool off in a unique way (kudos to me), but seriously?…I was just nuts. And now as I write this, I realize that my not showering was tied to the not brushing, because I always brushed out my hair after a shower (ah, epiphany). I was not living life normally, certainly not for an unemployed person or a standard alcoholic. I was in left field, running with my glove in the air to catch a ball that never landed. 

So you can imagine what my hair smelled like, in a wet knotted bun. There was never time for it to dry. One time at the bar I took my hair down and immediately realized it was matted, but I tried to wrap it around my neck in a cute way, then I quickly put it back up and paid more attention to my cold drink. It made me sad. It worried me, and soon my fear was validated when my nana got sight of it and said they might have to cut off all my hair. When the knots are impossible and the integrity is gone. 

I almost believed it, and not long after I got a good motivated buzz and tried to repair it. I got a brush and a bottle of vo5 strawberry conditioner. I crouched down in the shower and felt it sag in big lumps which had turned into one big lump. I was already intimidated. But I had to try,

One full bottle and a quite large pile of hair later (and maybe a can of beer), I had extracted strand by strand back to normal. Minus much of my hair, but I could live with that. I was actually proud of myself. I think I took an unsaid vow to never let that happen again. It actually started to go back to its normal curls, and I started wearing it down that way over that summer (probably cause I couldn’t find a hair tie either). It looked good, and I know cause I looked at it in the mirror a lot. I liked to flip the part on the side. And i started wearing some makeup too. From the outside I looked like a normal woman, but I was picked like a dill. 

And I’d like to say it never got matted again, but that would not be true. 

Today I wear it short, and I wash it every day (to get the nicotine smell out, and because I enjoy doing it) usually with suave, but I have used Pantene. I have a detangling cream that smells like cinnamon spice. I own two hairbrushes, and not a day goes by that I don’t give my hair the love it deserves. 

Like L’Oréal says, “…you’re worth it.”