Red Hair

One of the more innocent temptations of the internet is the opportunity to thumb (or click, in this age) through friends’ photos. Facebook was designed with this practice in mind. For the adventurous, as I will call them, there are new acquaintances to ‘check-out’ and, for a more nostalgic browse, there are old pictures of long-time friends. New pictures from distant friends draw my eye, frequently, but my personal favorites are the old pictures of new friends because they provide a taste of what time-travel might if it were at our disposal. I found an old photograph of a young lady I pester, her long and dark flow of brunette shaded red, instead. Not auburn nor a strawberry tint but a glorious, saturated red worthy of the artists’ palette. It was quite foxy, literally, since foxes boast a similarly luxurious red. It may be darker and more vivid yet, like this red velvet lily. I liked it and agreed with another commenter, that the red-hair looked good on her, to which she replied “What about my hair do you agree with, creep?” [let us put aside the term of endearment...]

In the fashion of our friendship, what was meant to be a simple compliment became a discussion. “Everybody has a red-hair phase,” she said with some finality, perhaps dismissively. I believe she meant to say that everyone has a phase where they want to be ‘different’. To say that all have a ‘red-hair phase’ might be true, yet it rings dissonant because the essence of a ‘red-hair phase’ is that the person is having it alone, a private rebellion. Hair is the convenient canvas for these alterations (altercations?). I relished the opportunity to turn the clock back for her, sending links to some dated photos of our mutual friend and of myself. The both of us had a different look: his closely cropped hair was a magnificent pony-tail and my tuft of dirty straw was a long, wild mane of green and purple like shredded rhubarb. Sometimes, the superficial change is negligible compared to the transition it represents. Beards are more subtle. When my grandfather died, the soul-patch disappeared from my face: I lost something. When my almost-fiancé left me, it grew it back: I found something else. To say that everyone has a ‘soul-patch’ does not do justice to the fact that I do.

The surprise in-store for me was not waiting in Facebook’s archives but in my own. In an external drive, the remnant of a former computer, over two hundred photographs spilled from their folders into a massive squirrel-cache of pictures. A few nights ago, I went in search of my ex-girlfriend: the ex of exes. As I was deleting every image of her years ago, I remember, there was just one that I had not. “How amusing,” I thought slyly, “I believe I do have some evidence of her humanity.” I scrolled past the painful cluster of images from three subsequent relationships, probing for just one picture of the lady who had risen from mere girl to prodigious arch-enemy, someone who seemed never to forgive me and who I forgave only to be free from continual reminiscences. In short, I did want one last laugh at her expense.

I had grossly misremembered, though there was only one image of her. The photograph I found was of a girl with ketchup-red hair, wearing a dark-green hoodie and snuggled against the floor in peaceful slumber. Well, perhaps not quite peaceful: her fist is balled next to her mouth, obscuring it, and there is a flush of pink next to mole on her cheek; her eye-brows look a little troubled, as if what she really needed was someone to come-over and squeeze her tight. There was nothing funny about any of it and I realized, too late, that I had not kept this photograph with any plans for black-mail, malicious intent or twisted pleasure. I kept the photograph because I loved her. I just cannot delete that.

It was a feeling much like putting my leg in small pond only to feel a huge coy brush past my calf and surface, orange and white, next to me. If I could keep time in a bottle, the bottle smashed when I opened that photo to full-screen and relapsed to a time before rhubarb hair and soul-patches, when my favorite person in the entire world emerged from a mini-van with vivid red-hair. Only weeks before, I had finally worked-up the nerve to tell her how I felt and she had let me take her out for her birthday; we rode the bus together to Ruby Tuesdays at Meridian Mall. The girl I had asked-out was a gorgeous blonde but I really did not mind the red-hair phase. This was the woman who snuggled me after the most invasive surgery of my life; she had driven me up to Muskegon to meet her family and friends, in spite of my demandingly frail state. There were kisses and hugs and long-conversations, movies and TV-nights and games with friends, and even a long-walk across our snowy campus that I made into a haiku. A few fragile scrapings of that time remain, like shreds of old newspaper so dirty and smudged that the text of the story is legible only to an extent. Suddenly, I wished there was an archive extensive enough to reconstruct every detail of her red-hair phase. Still, I know I must have felt that way before and that is why this picture is alone, precluding any hopes that might bring more pain. I must wrestle with the knowledge that I am the one who left it all this way. True, she did return her hair to something like its natural blonde. My father noted how it was like meeting a different girl, the following March. That was the woman who had done a multitude of inconsiderate things, each a thread in the tapestry of reasons that she became the ex of exes, the bad-example alluded-to, the bane of my close friends and the person who, at last, refused to offer forgiveness for me and any apology for herself. By the time we reached that point, years later, I did not expect either anymore.

It is not the blonde-superhero or the scruffy gentleman in the mirror who indict me, however. It is the sweet, snuggly red-head and a baby-faced guy with a nebulizer. In some ways, that incarnation of myself is as much a part of her phase, to me, as the locks of red she was eager to shed. I took my shedding too personally. Not content to be a red-hair phase, I set-out to have one. The week I became single, I skipped the patch under my lip when I shaved and continued to do so. I left me behind, for being too weak: I wanted to become my own blonde super-hero. I suffered the consequences through my own hate and pride.

Nothing would make me more content than to climb into that photograph and cuddle with that dozing red-head. More horrifying still, my body seemed to be telling me that I belonged there next to her. It seemed to forget the years of mutual neglect and disdain, the repeated gossip and scathing blog entries on my part, and the colossal split in our fellowship group that no one could quite put their finger on. Even I dare suggest. Period. My emotions forgot all of the implications and just wanted to go hold her again. The clean-shaving, short-haired, too-skinny, inhaler-carrying, cough-drop popping teenager (I was 19) inside of me remembers that she was cool. Awesome. She was sweet, smart and sexy. She was even saintly, sometimes, and never more than when she finally closed her eyes, and her mouth, and slept. To see her in such a vulnerable pose humanized her in a way that caught me off my guard. I wanted to watch her topple off the pedestal she made for herself: peer-leader, model-UN rep, ministry intern and other résumé fodder. “How appropriate,” I thought, “would it be to see her going through a goofy-phase like the rest of us.” Instead, I found her up on the pedestal I had made for her, when she was in her red-hair phase. The paradigm shift was for me.

I must say that not everyone has a red-hair phase. If they did, it might be a more beautiful world. I want us to embrace the internal part of our red-hair phase, the part that allows us to be vulnerable even as we are trying to show the world that we are strong on our own. Shirking that vulnerability was the mistake that she and I shared, though I take the brunt of the blame. It’s what I deserve after pushing her away, for any reason. At last, I hope that we go through our future red-hair phases much closer to Jesus.