Life and hair

Hear

She has long said that she cuts her hair to get rid of things. Very rarely, she says, is it a question of aesthetics. It’s not that I think I like this cut, I want to try it, I should make a bob or leave it long to my waist. She analyzes. The pains, the mistakes, the failures, the tears, when they were, what the hair was like, how to not remember them anymore. not even once. She lies to herself. Over time she asked herself at certain moments “what do I still do with this part of my hair that years ago was a root and now sticks to my cheeks”; “What do I do, for example, with these students who went on a graduate trip to Bariloche, who remember the fights with that classmate who kept insulting me.”

It wasn’t always like this. At first the world saw her with the shoulder cut and straight bangs because it was her mother who was in charge and although from time to time she must have cried, she must have told her “come on, mom, let me choose”, she never won. . Her straight hair that covers her back to make a very high ponytail, a bronze waterfall, like that of her friend Lucila, the one on the other block from her house, she doesn’t. could ever have. Her mother then was a practical woman. The short one was easier to avoid lice.

During her teenage years she was in control, but she doesn’t remember great satisfaction: she tried shoulder-length hair without bangs, hair on her shoulder blades and tied with B+D hair clips, and Milly’s orange or light blue flower ponytails. Canal, short hair like Dolores Fonzi in Summer of ’98, a complete disaster, brown hair with two blonde strands in front, hair neither very long nor very short, there, at the limit of what is expected.

It was when he was 20 or a little older that, as he remembers or asserts himself, he began with this theory. It has a detailed list. First, she got rid of the secondary problem with a cut in the hair salon below his house, Isabel, a white sign with handwritten letters in gold, from the middle of her back to the base of her neck, in four movements of scissors. She doesn’t have much hair. The years followed her, each one of them, the time she failed the entrance exam to study what she wanted at the conservatory, cut; that job interview that went wrong and left her in a job she couldn’t stand anymore, cut; her grandmother’s old age, her departure, court; the chest pains at dawn, her father’s illness, a romantic separation on a rainy afternoon that also led her to change her hair color, now black. She rarely did just the opposite: she didn’t touch it, she left it there, as a reminder. Her hair brushed his ear and warned him: be careful, don’t forget that this really happened. It wasn’t necessarily a good thing, but he did it anyway. One afternoon in 2017 she went to the hair salon in a shopping mall because a friend of hers had recommended it to her and she told the hairdresser to cut, to continue, not to stop. She cried when she left the place, she doesn’t know exactly why.

This summer she went to the dermatologist for her annual checkup. She wanted to check the moles and some small scales that appeared a few months ago and that look like moles but are not. They are barely round, brown, rough like a piece of freshly broken stone, horrible. It must have four or five. The doctor examined her body, confirmed that she had nothing to worry about (well, there is no cancer, she told herself) and when she asked about the scabs, the doctor uttered a sentence with the certainty of someone who crushes a cockroach in the kitchen: those come with age, they cannot be avoided, yes they can be removed but nothing guarantees that they will not come out again. She walked back to her house. A few days later she went to the hairdresser, just to cut her bangs.

Get to know The Trust Project