Yaniel Ayala Velez
September 01, 2023 10:43 PM
Making changes by Yaniel Ayala Velez
Severing charms were a scary thing to point anywhere vaguely near your own head. So Yaniel hadn’t. Nor had he gone to the medic, for help with a neat, tidy haircut, for fear she would try to talk him out of what he had wanted to do. He had, instead, given in to an itch that had burned in his fingers since preschool days, and taken his long braid in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other, and—with a final, silent apology to his Mama—hacked through the braid where it joined his head.It had been hard going, through the thick curls, but once he had made the first snip it was a done deal. He had to keep going.
The weirdest part of it was knowing what to do afterwards, with the thick rope of hair he had hacked from his head. Part of him wanted to destroy it so completely that it could never have existed. But he knew that burning hair smelt terrible and would probably cause a panic, and he wasn’t sure how to hex it into oblivion without adult supervision… And it was also a waste. It was good hair. Pretty. Wanted and loved.
Just not by him.
He had rolled it up in a spare t-shirt and shoved it in the bottom of his trunk, turning to the mirror to admire his new look.
It was, undoubtedly a mess. It was probably five kinds of uneven, and it was the absence of long hair rather than the truly cut back short-short hair that he wanted but… The first step was done. It was gone. He ran his hands over and over the back of his neck, finding the place where they met choppy ends and grinning to himself in the mirror.
That wasn’t exactly him in the reflection. There were other things he wished were different about his face, and he absolutely was not considering anything below the neckline right now for fear of bursting this happy bubble, but… It was a start. There was something in his reflection that he recognised and liked.
Even when he jammed a beanie over the top, so that he could go outside, it still looked… right. Different. There wasn’t any bulge of his braid being shoved up under the hat, like there usually was. The edges of his hair stuck out in places, and disappeared under the hat in others. He had often hidden his hair in his hat, and tried to see himself as he wanted, but he had always been conscious that that was a lie, a badly done illusion, and that it was waiting, stuffed up in his hat, ready to betray him and make everyone see him as something that he wasn’t.
He exited his dormitory, and the Crotalus Common Room, breezing through quickly so he didn’t have to talk to anyone there. He wasn’t sure he was ready to share even this small part of being himself with people he didn’t know. He had vague intentions to go get a proper haircut now that he’d taken the first step by himself, or find someone else who could help him, but for now it was enough to walk through the world without feeling like he wanted to melt into its floor and cease to exist.
He reached up, pinching at one of the stumpy ends that was sticking out the back of his beanie as he set out along one of his favourite paths of the labyrinth.
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Yaniel Ayala Velez
Making changes
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