Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Resistance

I saw it for the first time. It looked like a sliver of the moon or a lightning strike in the sky. It was the colour of chemically washed pearls. Or a soft silken beige woven thread perhaps? It stared back at me like a blank sheet of paper, almost mocking me. My plan of attack was colour. I thought hard what colour it should adorn. Brown would be the obvious choice. Black maybe akin to faking it. A dash of red to spice things up? I was definitely not bold enough for a purple streak.

I looked again. Hoping it would’ve gone away. But it was still there. Like a speck of light, way out in the dark sea. Distinctive, confident, unapologetic. The exact shade of milky vanilla ice cream. Or dusty greying pages of a second-hand forgotten book. I could be poetic about it. I could even try and ignore it. It was merely a lone, aloof grey strand of hair today. But what would happen when it multiplied tomorrow? 

I had seen them several times before. Heavy, bulging, a weird shade of purple-black. Drooping, like gravity was working extra hard on them. They looked like lumps on what previously was a smooth vanilla milkshake. They were a testament of my troubles. A declaration of my distress. A reminder of the rat race. An advertisement of the adversaries. 

They were the first thing people noticed about me. Despite my pretty pink dresses and darling black shoes. I soothed them with whitish green cool cucumber slices. I nourished them with hot green tea bags, cooled down to room temperature. I indulged them with 8-hours of beauty sleep, interspersed with dreams from my beautiful youth. But my eye bags and puffy dark circles had become a part me. 

Finally, my hair had caught up with my eyes. It was futile resisting now.