Hair, Dry, Love

I'm in a serious relationship with my hairdryer. I received it as a gift from my brother-in-law Curt when I was studying abroad in Ireland in 2008 and it's still chugging along. It's moved with me from dorm to dorm, house to house, across state lines and back.

It's a simple model, utilitarian, classic. Grey and black. The handle folds neatly into itself and the cord retracts. It fits my hand.

I had long, long hair then. I'd asked for it specifically as part of a secret santa type deal I had going with my siblings and their significant others that Christmas. The gift pegged Curt as the giver right away: it was exactly what I wanted and arrived within days of the request. He sent me a lot of sweet little presents that December: that poster of Obama changed to say STRONG EXAMS, Elvis's Blue Christmas sent directly to my inbox. But I loved the hairdryer most of all. The housing for international students was a converted seminary and it was cold. I had a sink in my room and a mirror, but the showers were down a long, drafty hall with a bone-chilling wood floor. The showers themselves were housed in a beautiful but unheated tiled room. The water never quite got hot and I would race back to my room sopping wet, towel off my hair, the strands already freezing together, and stand in front of my mirror, dryer in hand, until I was warm.

I didn't quite know how to wear my long hair yet. I didn't know how to handle any of it in fact, it being sudden sexual attention after two years at Bryn Mawr, sudden appraisals, flirtations, seductions, rituals I couldn't understand. I was negged constantly, probably because men could sense my discomfort, my willingness to be fixed. I was teased about my glasses, my vocabulary, my fashion choices--everything was fair game and I had no tools to deflect, absorbed every scrap greedily regardless, even when what I felt was more bewildered and hurt than adored and hungered for. I believed everything anyone said about me.

 I got attention for my hair and I would puzzle over it, experimenting with different speeds and strengths of the dryer, different head movements and levels of toweling required. I had no idea what the fuck was happening. I would flip my hair back and forth, running my fingers through the strands, trying to make sense of the adult emerging in front of my eyes, this woman with long hair, with effect.

 My new friends and I took advantage of our study abroad experience to drink as much as humanly possible, and definitely more than was probably good for my fragile 21 year-old brain. I threw up in bar bathrooms all over Dublin. I broke wine glasses, ran down city streets, woke up with strange bruises and generally made an ass out of myself in ways that only a recently de-virginized Catholic girl with a taste for freedom and an equally strong taste for love can. I danced all night and slept on floors and lost cellphones and followed strangers around. I ditched a taxi. I kissed anyone who'd ask and some who didn't. I held my friend's hair back for her and peed simultaneously while she puked eight euros of white wine into an alley behind a McDonald's, and then helped her befriend a stray cat stumbling back to my dorm. I fell in love with the best friend I made there and hid his lube and condoms from his visiting mother when he was in the hospital.

 I slept with an unbelievably hot Swedish man and he got me good, made sex real to me in a way it hadn't been. He broke my glasses one drunken night and refused to give head and I confused watching Die Hard on his lap and then fucking for some kind of commitment. Once he and his friend intimated spanking me for breaking something in the kitchen late one night and it was so casual and erotic that I flushed more completely than I ever have since. I helped fruit vendors unpack at dawn in Berlin with my best friend from home and my twin sister. I went home with the tour guides from the Guinness factory after being called out on microphone for tripping spectacularly in the lobby. I stole their wooden parrot and received a text the next day that read "You probably shouldn't have given us the benefit of the doubt." I went to karaoke every Thursday night at the Wicked Wolf and drank cider through straws.

The depth of my innocence, my lack of preparedness, was completely unknown to me. I spent a lot of time in that cold little room, eating toast and delicious irish butter arduously prepared in a shared kitchen three flights of stairs down, streaming episode of episode after any cheesy American sit-com I could find until the room lightened, sleeping through my classes until the afternoon. I wept while gchatting and watched every Britney Spears video I could find. I stayed up all night writing papers I had done all the reading for within the first two weeks of the semester, fantasized endlessly and shamelessly about every male Irish professor I had.

So the perfect gift came at the perfect time. It was silly, I knew, but it touched me deeply when I opened it, and every time I thought of Curt selecting it on some website, entering in my address. Thinking of me, maybe, and this simple act of providing something for me I couldn't provide for myself. I'd sung Chapel of Love with him and my sister on the final drive to their wedding, Caitlin's dress filling the car with its whiteness, the green and gold of June in Connecticut flying past, saturating the blue sky glinting in the mirrors and windows, our mood nearly hysterical. We'd run a half-marathon together, drunk cocktails in their first apartment in South Boston. He'd covered for me when I'd gotten wasted at an early summer party my first year home from college, taking the blame for the noise my friends made dragging me up the stairs to my bedroom.

Thinking of his love and friendship comforted me every time I dried my hair. There were a lot of hard times to come, and a lot of times Curt would give me more than an appliance to ease them. But the hairdryer says it all for me. Even now I can get a sparkle thinking about it as I warm up with a quick blow on greasy hair or take my time going full witch blown out--it being generosity,  it being love, it being having someone on your side even when they are very far away.

My hairdryer now is more about meditation and security than it is a tool of discovery. It's a great way to calm myself down before going somewhere, the whoosh of hot air around my head in counterpoint to some deep breaths, some forward folds and neck rolls to get the blood flowing. I look at myself in the mirror and luxuriate in the feeling of my hair falling over my shoulders, the smooth flow of it through my hands, my fingers on my scalp. The gradual change from damp to dry, the moments in between. I put it down for a minute and change the song, put on underwear, make my bed, then pick it up again, start fresh.

I joke about it, but there's a part of me that truly believes I derive strength from my hair. When I have really good sex or a really good meal or a really good workout I picture it all going straight to my hair. Spiritual and practical: When I'm using my dryer, I assess the health of my hair and think about what I've been doing lately, how that might be transfiguring what's literally coming out of my head. Curt is a filmmaker, among much else, and in his first documentary there's a scene that's always stuck with me, a scientist testing Curt's hair to assess his intake of corn products. I still find it amazing how much he could deduct just from a strang of hair. My hair is a barometer of my overall status, my overall alignment with elementary principles of input and output.

We're told that we mustn't become too attached to objects, but to me that carries the same flaw in logic as saying that money can't buy happiness. What I really needed, as that bitter December passed, was a way to dry my goddamn wet cold mass of hair, and I was too broke to buy a fucking 12 euro hairdryer. It was just exactly what I needed. And, as so often happens when we ask for what we really need, I got a hell of a lot more than that.