Bristling against my anxious fingers was an unfamiliar stubble, never touched by the sun, only by the gray light of the bathroom illuminating sunken stone-blue irises. The irises and their dark pupils, constricted under the light, flicked over the figure in the mirror. To the pale, clenched jaw, inwards to the lips pursed in tension and concentration. Finally, to the newly crooked hair.

Almost like a taper, with the bangs barely touched by the shivering blade, and the side of the scalp almost exposed. Much like my razor, I was shaking. 

When I had started, there was an ability to go back, an opportunity to shut off the bathroom lights and go back to bed. Only a tiny piece of hair shaven from under the layers. No one would notice.

I couldn’t do that anymore.

If I decided to stop now, everyone would think I was insane. I thought I looked insane regardless. What would my family think if they saw me right now? My bed empty, the intermittent toothy sound associated both with an electric razor and a torture weapon. Something out of a horror movie.  

The nervous breakdown it would appear I was having was the last thing on my mind at that moment, my head instead occupied by the source of my shaking and weak knees. I wasn’t entirely sure if what was weighing my shoulder blades into my spine was an unbearable adrenaline rush or an anxiety attack, and I’d never realized how similar they were. The only difference was the spearmint of exhilaration against my bitten inner lips as shaky breaths left them. I whispered into the mirror to dispel my jitters, narrating into a stream of consciousness until I looked down to the towel under my feet and was cut short. 

I’d never seen that much hair in one place.

The volume of it gathered on the towel could be mistaken for a severed head, but all I saw was the loss of a past self. Am I now piloting a different person, one who makes rash decisions in the dead of night? Because it certainly feels that way. Would the now-dead vessel do this? Is she the one who did it in the first place? Or was it akin to tearing apart a cocoon? Perhaps she, with her self-cut bangs and slowly-dripping worldview like heated glass, had run out of time. Perhaps I will return to her. I am still a coward who doesn’t want to be seen as a failed woman, a crazy woman. I thought I was past the insecurity, but I have only exposed it to the world and all but invited it to tell me how big my forehead is.