My Best Friend Used to Cut My Hair

"Isn’t that the secret indulgence of friendship, being near what you can never be?"

Yaroslav Shuraev

My best friend Laur used to cut my hair with craft scissors. I’d sit in her bathroom on a kitchen stool while she trimmed my black locks, a dark sea gathering at our feet.¹ 

We met in college but grew closest after splitting with our partners a few years later. In search of love again, we sought the safety of friendship. The things we needed from each other were unspoken, being vulnerable as women. Neither one of us would let the other walk home alone in the dark or be pinned to a wall on a date.

Her lips firetruck red, Laur flooded into nightclubs like a siren. She negotiated the tab down with one voltaic look. Isn’t that the secret indulgence of friendship, one poet said, being near what you can never be?² A scrappy grad student, I’d don her peacock blouses on Friday nights, sit ankles-crossed at a bar in her black leather dress. She lent me wit. She taught me the dance between strangers. In the early morning hours, we scrubbed off our glitter, our necks too tired to hold up our confident heads. 

She slept beside me after heartbreak and I never dreamed alone. But some nights, when I thought it was just going to be the two of us, the first cocktails draining bright down our throats, she’d tell me she invited out some others to meet us — her coworkers or acquaintances, once our Denny’s waiter. By then, I had resigned to having fewer drinks, wearing nothing around my neck. Second-day hair. I sensed that being myself made me less enchanting.

When I broke the news to Laur about going to be with my partner out of state, it was late on a Tuesday after trivia night. We had a disagreement in the parking lot. She got back into her car while I still needed her. I knew that our friendship had changed. I made the trip out of Denver without much contact with her, no more than a few texts.

A barber I don’t know has his hands in my hair now. He cuts off four inches like I ask, but I can’t explain to him how Laur feathered the ends, how she took all the weight off.

There was one night we stayed in watching movies and threw on hoodies for a midnight drive. I loved her best then, when I didn’t have to masquerade as her, as any woman I wasn’t. Ours are the moments I play in the dark, we sang loud to Lorde, her car a fast light show down the highway. We were wild and fluorescent / come home to my heart.

The barber frames my face with heavy curls and I pay him, remembering when I’d tease Laur, asking what she charges. “The only cost is your friendship,” she’d say.

1. I’ve changed her name.

2. Line by Anders Carlson-Wee, in his poetry book Disease of Kings.