Tuesday, November 13, 2007 | by nathan

Can We Talk About My Hair For A Second?

I’ve alluded to this before, but in October 2002, when I was living with my ex-boyfriend in a shoe box apartment in New Haven, CT., I accidentally broke out a plate glass window at a Wendy’s and had my scalp sliced down to the bone by huge chunks of glass. I got a 14-inch scar, a zillion stitches, and lost the feeling in large patches of the top of my head.

When this happened I was going through an "I don’t want to deal with my hair" phase. Preceding this was the "hippie" phase of my college years, wherein I grew my hair out ridiculously long, traveled Europe, and then on a whim, buzzed it off, and kept it buzzed. So when I had big, ugly, black stitches sticking out of my head, looking like weeds or antennae, it showed. People asked.

I was working at a bank at the time, and on my first day back after the accident - with stitches, a black eye, bloodied and sliced-up hands and eyes that were constantly watery from all the crying I’d been doing - a woman approached my teller station. In a voice that couldn’t have sounded more irritated, she asked, "Oh my God, what happened to you?" Like I’d smeared myself in jelly and was wearing tattered rags. Like my grotesque appearance was some kind of statement.

"I fell in love," I remarked sarcastically, then took her deposit slip from her hand.

"These fucking kids," the woman growled, looking to my boss for agreement.

I slammed the deposit slip down on the desk as hard as I could, and the word "Bitch!" almost escaped my mouth, but I managed to choke back my temper and finish the transaction as quickly as possible, wanting the whole time to tell her to take her fur coat and her money and meet me at the plate glass window at the front of the store, because I was going to show her exactly what had happened to me.

My stitches came out and I was left with a large, visible scar on the top of my head. It seemed to take forever for my hair to grow back out after that, like the accident had scared it, and it was going to stay close to the ground from now on. The subject of my accident came up in a few job interviews after I returned to Oklahoma, and I never heard back from the interviewers.

Finally, though, my hair did grow back out, and it’s been in varying states of longness ever since. I keep bangs, and generally kind of do the whole "look at me, I have rimmed glasses and my hair’s in my eyes" look. I look like someone who listens to Interpol way too much. See? April 2006 is a good example:

Something happened last week. It was an exceedingly rough week, peppered liberally with family dramas, emergency surgeries (everyone’s fine), and a whole lot of tears, one set of which happened because CARRIE UNDERWOOD CAME ON THE RADIO. See? Okay. It was a hard week.

I’ve been thinking about buzzing my hair again for awhile now, kind of telling myself I’d do it, and then not doing it, and having this whole inner dialogue. Thursday night after Brian and I got home from the gym I just did it. I whipped out the clippers and buzzed my hair off. Brian sat, watching, stunned, thinking perhaps that some piece of my fragile psyche had finally chipped away and fallen into the ocean, like a piece of an iceberg. It was, after all, a fairly intense experience for me, exposing this scar to the world again.

But I finished, and it felt nothing like I’d expected. I wasn’t okay with the scar, or that it showed. Five years after this horrible thing happened, it still terrifies me to think what could have happened to me that night. Some of that pain still lingers; I suppose it always will. It hurts that this event made me quit grad school and move home, that it was the worst in a series of awful events that drove me into a two-year depression.

But also, it’s over now. I looked at my hair, and my scar, and felt just kind of okay for a minute or two. And then, I came to work and everyone seemed to like how I looked. Only one person asked about the scar, and I didn’t have a problem telling the story. My head feels lighter, and I can’t stop running my hand over my little fuzzy scalp. So I guess, five years later, I’m okay. I wish I could tell 2002 Nathan just how wonderful his life will become, half a decade later. In a way, I suppose I did.

Anyway, enough talk; what do you think?

and here’s the scar in question. It actually goes a significant distance up the top of my head as well, but maybe it looks a little badass, too. No? Oh, well.

I Have A Story, This I Believe