Strands of Memory
                                    I. A Dash of Red (On Human Fallibility)

       The first haircut that I can remember receiving occurred at my grandparents’ house. I sat on a stool in the center of the living room—the main attraction of a twisted, three ring circus. The gray, amorphous blob of Uncle Rick rested beside me on an old couch the same color as sand, and almost as comfortable. Its only redeeming asset was the flowing pattern of pastel flowers, which now drooped heavily beneath Uncle Rick’s body. He was watching a football game, most likely working through his fourth or fifth bag of peanuts.
       “Come on boys, let’s get it… Come on… Woo-hoo-HOO!” He jumped up, and the sound of the television was lost in the cry of his voice, a loud triumphant trumpet—humorous because he had, only seconds before, unsheathed his bitter tusks in response to a referee’s bad call. I sat silently, not understanding the significance of either action— thinking that in either case he was making mammoths out of mosquitoes. A few seconds later, he still stood there, breathless but happy, chuckling in prolonged celebration.
       “Honey, you have two choices—either shut up or shut it off.” Aunt Wanda, his wife, had scurried into the room in her ragged, light blue Disney World shirt. Her thin squeak of a voice and mousy mat of hair were accentuated by her thick glasses, which gleamed greedily over her ink-drop eyes. He looked at her—Uncle Rick with all his love of football, with his voice like an atom bomb, with his mass and all of his muscle—and he nodded silently, indicating that he had taken the first choice. “Thank you,” she said stupidly, walking to the television to turn it off anyway.
        Beyond the living room lay the kitchen, where Uncle Tim stood at a messy counter. He had been watching the game with a happily vacant expression—like a harmless, sweetly scented candle with no purpose but dull decoration. However, when Aunt Wanda turned off the television, a brief, pale warmth shot across his face; I was the only person to see it. He knew it too, and he smiled at me—his favorite—as he turned to her. “Wanda, thank you so much,” he said smoothly, “I really do appreciate it. It was disturbing my reading.”
        “Don’t worry about it at all,” squeaked Wanda, oblivious to the fact that what Uncle Tim was reading was a Sports Illustrated and that he was wearing his favorite Carolina Panthers sweatshirt. I had seen Uncle Tim speak like this before; his caustic remarks would spread across conversations with the sleek, surreptitiousness of oil—though they could have been mistaken for molasses—and he would typically drop a casual match into the oil, creating a conflagration of confusion. That day, however, he must have felt generous, and Wanda was sadly saved from the vitriol—the practiced, restrained incense—of Uncle Tim, the firebreather.
        Among the others, there were also the trapeze artists—my grandparents, who struggled financially for years, yet somehow survived in defiance of the overwhelming gravity of poverty. By the time they had raised their six children, they were soaring—a deed only made possible by the sum of some wonderful whole, like a two-piece puzzle or two wings in flight. My grandparents sat on another sandy couch, and my baby cousin and baby brother crawled by their feet, resembling two cute seals blindly willing to do any trick for a reward. Also in the kitchen, there was Uncle Edward, whose two hands were often clumsily engaged juggling through a mixture of jobs; and Aunt Pamela, with her auburn hair which bounced like Slinkys and her inclination joke in all situations—regardless of how improper the joke was. And then there was Mom.
        My mom had always had a resolution of granite—had always stared down life fearlessly as if it were some terrifying beast, yet as if she were by far its superior. She now stood above me, a lesser conquest than most, brandishing a pair of scissors poised at my mane—though perhaps it would have been much easier to locate me in the Land of Oz than in a dark den on some ruthless plain. As she began her task, I easily relinquished whatever youthful fire I had within me to bask in the feeling of her love, a love without limits, without exception, a love of watchfulness and stern protection—then, a quick slash of pain ran across my ear.
        Within a millisecond, my mom screamed. She had dropped the scissors and hugged me, wet apologies streaming down her face to mine. The circus act was over; my family all stopped what they were doing to stare at the confused congealing of tears and blood.
       “Do something!” smoked the wisp of Uncle Tim’s voice.
        “You’re going to get blood on the carpet!” whined Aunt Wanda.
        “Ear you go,” said Aunt Pamela, rushing in with some paper towels.
        “Goo?” asked my brother and cousin in unison.
        Without warning, a sonic boom of laughter shook the room. My mom, still crying, held me, who throughout the entire experience had been completely still. Finally, I looked up into her eyes and told her that it was okay, that it didn’t really hurt. Our eyes met and before we knew it, the laughter had begun once more—this time with two new voices, the sniffle-ridden giggle of a mother and the hearty roar of her cub.

                           II. Feeling Blue (On Individuality and Conformity)

       It was March of 2004. The halls of Charles D. Owen Middle school were filled with the awkwardly uncertain bodies of its students. Most of us were lazily bobbing through the sea of existence, fledging Argonauts too blinded by youth to notice that we were on the verge of confronting a monstrosity more dangerous than Scylla, much darker and more unforgiving than Charybdis—we were sailing straight into high school. Unlike the others, I knew the truth—indeed, I thought of myself as much more self-aware, simply more aware in general—aware of life, of people, of the colors and sensations crawling through my nerves and into my brain—but I was not without my own flaws. In an attempt to differentiate myself from the masses, I tried on a variety of personas—like a ghost, completely lacking in shape or substance, cloaking myself in someone’s ragged bed sheets, hoping to Boo! some sense of meaning into my life.
       One day, after much careful planning, I entered the halls of the school as a new person—my blue, spiked hair in thick clumps like dead grass, my oversized band hoodie devouring me like a black hole. I walked to my Algebra classroom, hungry for the reactions that I knew awaited me. Inside, I crossed through the bubbles of babble in the middle of the room to my single desk—most everyone else sat at a four person table—deliberation in my every moment. Once I had taken my seat, I was feeling great—all eyes were on me, and my normally incessantly chattering classmates were speechless. I felt like I had tossed a stone into a lake, like I was completely indestructible—until he entered the room.
       Mr. Arbola was born in Boston, and his voice bore a remarkable resemblance to that of Sean Connery. Words heavily dripped from his mouth like lead, crushing the girls in the room with frenzied euphoria at the sound of smorgasbord or paraboler. I didn’t understand—I didn’t like his class, didn’t like his subject, didn’t like his voice, and I didn’t like him. To me, he was just a pompous old man. Apparently, the dislike was mutual.
       He entered the room like he always had, wearing his typical, proper button-up shirt and a thin curl of contempt on his lips—but the sea of my oblivious, dumbfounded classmates parted like he were Moses. My desk was the closest to his, and he paused above me for a moment. The look in his eye was not quite a challenge—I doubt that I was worthy of such a consideration—but the look of contemplating something silly. I forced my eyes to meet his, to hear what he had to say.
       “What are you, some kind of Smurf?” The words were like a death sentence or a curse, and my classmates were broken from their stupor. They all laughed, and Mr. Arbola, moving to the front of the classroom, abandoned me in cold indifference. For the rest of the class period, I sat in a boil of hatred and embarrassment, blind and deaf to the discussion about his stupid drawrings.
       After that class, I slowly waded through the murk of the day’s progression, curiously awaiting 4th block, when—I hoped—my classmates would have forgotten about Algebra and I would have a chance at redemption. Entering Mrs. Jacobson history class, I still felt some residual anger from Algebra, but I tried to be hopeful. Mrs. Jacobson was much sweeter than Mr. Arbola, and I actually did well in her class.
       I sat at a table of four, with my friend Daniel seated to my right. Not even he knew about my trump card—the act which would solidify my individuality in the eyes of everyone. We worked on a simple coloring project. Dimly focusing on my work, my patience and joy slowly began to flatline—until finally the intercom erupted into sound, like the sharp triangle of life on a heart monitor.
       “Mrs. Jacobson, please send Jeffrey to the office. His dad’s here to sign him out.”
       I began smiling and slowly moved my materials into my backpack, hoping for silence and uncertainty to spread like disease among the minds of my classmates. As I stood up, I turned to no one in particular, ready to announce the reason for my departure.
       I began proudly, “I’m going to—”
       “He’s probably going to go home to wash his hair.” Unbelievably, for the second time that day, one of my teachers had evoked sharp cracks of laughter from my classmates, each crack as sharp and as painful as a shotgun blast to my chest.
       In a rush of red embarrassment, I ran to the doorway and spoke a final, thin attempt at redemption, “Actually, I’m going to a Linkin Park concert.” The words didn’t seem as powerful as I had expected, and I walked into the hall to slowly make my way to the office, like a crawl from a torture chamber.
       Much of the rest of that day has been lost in a gray blur, the gray of miles of coarse highway stretching beneath my dad’s aging Camaro. Even much of the concert has been lost to me—in fact, only one memory remains. As I took my seat in the darkness of the Greensboro Coliseum, I gazed at the immense gathering of people who were there. All around me there were people with their own twisted hair colors, their own black hoodies. I even saw a couple of kids from my own school dancing across the floor which would eventually become a mosh-pit.
       It was there—in that darkest of darkness, as a slow wash of noise rolled off of the amplifiers to paralyze me—that I realized the truth. While there was nothing wrong with my wish to be an individual, I constructed this individuality to impress others. If your individuality somehow stems from others, then it isn’t quite individuality. It’s like trying to plant a beautiful flower in a pile of garbage—it just doesn’t work.

                           III. The Lime Green Safe (On Life's Ephemerality)

       The tiles of my grandparents’ kitchen floor stretched out in uniform rows of white—like a chess board in complete harmony, with no need for conflict or the calculated chaos of a game. I sat in front of the sink, staring at the towering silhouettes of my grandpa, who sat in a wooden chair with his striped button-up shirt, and my grandma, a woman as fragile and sweet as a sugar cookie. Though she was standing, my grandma was barely taller than my grandpa, and I could only see her gray curl of hair and her gentle blue eyes over his head.
       “Now Charlie, sit still.” My grandpa had put an old, earth-colored cigar to his lips, taking a deep and thoughtful drag. Hearing her wish, he put the cigar back into the black ashtray on the table to his side.
       “Pumpkin, you know I need my cigar. Rick already tried to tell me off for smoking today. Did you hear what he said?”
       “I don’t care much about what Rick said, not as long as he’s with that old Wanda bit—”
       “Now sugar, don’t talk like that with the boy in the room.”
        I looked up at them, curious and intent, and crawled to where I could see them both. My grandma’s face became grave, gravity dragging her lips into a frown. “I know, but she just ain’t…” All she could do was shake her head slowly.
        My grandpa laughed. “Betty Louise, you best not get too mad with them scissors—not while you’re cutting my hair. Besides, sweetie, I don’t want you getting too upset about that Wanda. She’s just a little…” He paused, widening his eyes and twiddling his fingers in the air.
       I looked up at him and asked, “What do you mean Grandpa Charlie?”
       “I don’t think you’re old enough to know about all that, honey.” He smiled again, reaching for his cigar.
       I was dejected and sat in front of the sink again, watching thin wisps of his gray hair falling to the floor like snow. As I looked at the fridge, I noticed a lime-green magnet shaped like a safe. I picked it up and dropped to the floor by my grandpa, grabbing tufts of hair to put in the safe.
       “Don’t you pick that up,” said Grandma, who had trust issues with anything that had traveled to the dark underworld of the floor.
        I looked straight into those blue eyes and said, “I just wanna keep a little piece of Grandpa—you know, to have forever.” After that, neither of them said much else. Eventually I closed the lid on the safe and returned it to the fridge, oblivious to the importance of what I had said.
       Many years later—many excruciating hospital visits, oxygen tanks, and an unbearable amount of pain later—my grandma passed away. After her funeral, my family returned to my grandparents’ house to spend time together. It was a new house, one with a beautiful spread of grass basking in the summer sun. I stood in the kitchen, my white button-up untucked, my tie hanging loose like a tongue too dry for speech.
       The refrigerator was new as well, but my grandma had taken care to decorate it with the magnets and various what-nots of the previous one. There was a picture of me in third grade, standing at the top of a slide with two classmates—my fly was unzipped, and I had not a care in the world. There was a thin magnetized strip with an old woman shaking her rolling pin, a single quote gracing its tiny space: “Because I’m the mom, that’s why!”On the side of fridge, I found that old lime-green safe and picked it up. Inside, there were still a few hairs clinging around the edges. I put the safe back and walked to the window, where I could see my grandpa sitting on the porch steps—a pipe in his mouth, a void in his heart.
       It’s very hard to hold onto life. We try to sneak some of it away into our pocket, or keep a little piece of it in a box somewhere. We end up driving our fingernails into whatever we can, hoping to salvage some piece of the present to keep us warm in a harsh future—the problem is, we only so many fingers and, sometimes, we can’t hold onto everything at once. Sometimes, we even forget to snatch that extra kiss on the forehead or that last hug. Then, all we have are the memories inside are heads—and sometimes that's okay, because at least no one can take them away from us.