Blue Haired Girl by Hannah Macza

I have a terrible, nasty habit of needing control. Some might call it an obsession or even a disorder. My therapist Dr. Suzuki has gone as far as calling it an addiction. We sit in zen-like office filled of plants. He is trained in Internal Family Systems therapy and is always trying to get me to gather all my different “parts” together. 

“Pretend you are throwing a dinner party!” He leans back into his plastic chair. Before I know it, I am sandwiched in between shame and excitement, fear, anger and elation. You name the feeling; they’re in attendance and starving. 

 “This is the worst party I’ve ever been to,” I say while lying down, sucking on a strand of my blue hair. My hair is the most consistent thing I can control. Manipulating it with dye. Cutting it to the exact length I want. However, no matter what I do, I am never satisfied. Dr. Suzuki tells me working with my parts instead of against them will help my problem.

 “You can’t control other people, but you can control your reaction to them.” 

I exhale and choose instead to make fun of his tight-fitting pants that professional men always seem to wear. I tell him I don’t care. I am too logical for this type of therapy.  I don’t live with my heart fully pumping on my sleeve. It’s too hard to in this world, and I have mastered the art of not feeling.

One way I like to practice control is to pretend my life is a movie. I pre-plan everything before it happens. What the moment is going to feel like, how the room will be decorated. Every conversation reduced to pauses in speech, a flutter of eyes, a strand of blue hair tucked behind my ear in flirtation. In my self-directed movies I am always witty, provocative and in control of everything. 

I was dating somebody over the summer and I told him all about this thing I do, and he loved it. We started to pretend we were stars of a TV show together. We were on a long road trip from Montreal to Vancouver Island and every leg of the trip was a different episode. We were going our separate, respective ways once we got to the other side. He was moving to Europe and we had decided we were casual. I was pretending like my character was totally on board. 

“At some point, the show’s gotta end,” he said while driving on our last day together. 

“You know, sometimes shows run for 20 years,” I say in a weird high-pitched voice back.  “Like Friends! Or that other one ….M.A.S.H!”             

In a pre-planned world, I would have been way cooler in that moment. I would have said, “it was a must-watch series.” And his deep-set eyes would have met mine, and as he drove he would squeeze my hand and move it down to my thigh. Maybe we would have even pulled over to have passionate sex in the truck or outside on a blanket laid out in a pea field. 

We did that sort of thing a lot on the road trip. He’d bite his tongue, wink, and say, “you’re fun,” afterward. But I wasn’t supposed to be fun. He was supposed to be in love with me. 

After we separated, I pretended our lives split off into our own mini-series. It was September when I arrived home to the island broken-hearted, but I swallowed my heart and chose to feel nothing.  My friends decided we were going on a camping trip and would be dyeing my hair blue. There was a “blue moon” that night. Supposedly the next one wasn’t for another 33 moons, whatever that means.  We dropped tabs of acid onto each other’s tongues and dyed my hair. Staying up all night, we danced under the white light of the moon that felt as energizing as the sun. Our limbs moved through the moonbeams as we danced together to every song with the word “moon” in it. “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young and “Blue Moon” by Billie Holiday… It was beautiful and childlike until I woke up the next morning, back in this realm, eyeing myself in the car’s side window. 

  “I have fucking blue hair.”

  “It’s main character energy!” they said to try and console me.

  “I’m not ready yet,” I tell them, but they keep trying.

  “It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!” 

  “Except I look nothing like Kate Winslet!” I scream. 

I was embarrassed when I showed up the next day to start a house-sitting gig for some family friends. They’re an eccentric 70-year-old couple whose home was warm and full after being lived in for over thirty years. It is filled with decorations of world travel knick-knacks, movie posters and family portraits. Teak wooden furniture and the weird boxy configuration of rooms make it feel like we are permanently and forever living out the 90s. There is an abundant garden out back and the beach right out front. As I became more comfortable in the house, I started to pretend that I was an indie film star. A quirky blue-haired girl living at the beach. Where the sky, water and I all mix together in every hue of blue imaginable. 

I ate toast in my underwear and cranked the music all the way up, shimmying through the house in my underwear, twirling and frolicking and getting crumbs everywhere until I’d catch myself in the mirror and stop. Seeing my hair and worrying that I was losing control.

That night’s episode of my life’s hit TV series was that I was throwing a dinner party. I pretended that the house belonged to me. I tied an apron around my waist and decided to go all out and create a feast. There was a mist of soft rain falling under the streetlamps outside and I put Miles Davis on the record player. I’d invited everyone I know, which really isn’t saying much. My friends from the camping trip and my childhood crush, Jack Valentine who was ferrying in from the mainland. Him coming was a big deal, but he’s one of those people that you shouldn’t get too excited about. He might not come at all. He’s an unreliable character and my relationship with him my whole life has been a series of coming and going. 

I have been infatuated with this boy from the first moment I met him. His dad’s cabin was right beside my stepdad’s. I was a pre-teen when I first remember being introduced to the Valentine twin brothers. They were chewing on Spitz and looked like two cowboys, Heath Ledger doppelgangers, sitting on a bench in a saloon, shirtless and spitting seeds onto the sand. Jack’s twin brother, Zach, was warm. Zach asked me questions and offered me the bag. Jack barely muttered a hello. It was like I was waving my hands in front of his face, trying to get him to see me and I couldn’t reach him. I kept trying. I tied my bikini up as tight as it could go around my scrawny neck lifting what little I had to work with. I pursed my lips, swayed my chest, and strutted along the beach trying to get Jack’s attention. Until my older stepbrother put a stop to my peacocking by laughing at me in front of everyone. 

 “Why the hell are you walking like that?” Jack finally saw me just this once to join in and laugh. 

I didn’t see him again until we ended up at the same high school. I had just been expelled from my school for getting into a punching match with a girl over a boy we both liked. I was transferred into a self-sustainable program for delinquents called “Earth Keepers” at his school. The program was run by two hippies, who of course ended up falling in love, getting married and starting an organic farm. The classroom was open concept and I remember on my first day, the double doors bursted open to Jack and his crew striding down the hallway, walking with the cool air of attractiveness and uncaring.  Jack stopped and gave me a hug. Jack was popular in high school and I absolutely was not. He was handsome, confident and could talk to everybody. I was insecure and held everyone at arm’s length. We didn’t hang out at all, but I saw him around at parties. He was always making out with somebody. 

Jack started dating the most popular girl in school. She was a track star who was destined to make it to the Olympics. She didn’t drink or party and the high school crowd went absolutely mad for their romance. They broke up in senior year when Jack got too drunk and drove his truck into the living room of a random person’s house, landing himself a DUI. 

After we graduated, we both traded our sleepy hometown for the big city of Vancouver. Our lives ebbed and flowed in the same wavy direction playing out the same pattern of never becoming close and only seeing each other at parties. He’d have his toned arm slung around the shoulders of a slinky model. Or be outside a club smoking a cigarette under the neon lights surrounded by artists in lace and leather. He’d wave me over and give me a hug and I’d feel a part of the magic of his world for a moment. 

I did kiss him eventually. Our lives spit us out onto the same beach in Mexico. New location, same old us. I was wasted on tequila and dancing around a fire with some Europeans I had met at my hostel when who, of all people, shimmied up beside me. We hugged and he lifted a strand of my pink hair I had died with Hibiscus flower. 

  “Cool hair.” He complimented. “I’m buying us shots!”

Hours later I stumbled over and sat beside him and a Zoe Kravitz look alike on the beach. He slid his toned arm around my shoulders, I melted into him and he put his cigarette in my mouth. 

The beautiful woman’s lips murmur, “Are you a couple?”

  “Nah, just good buddies,” Jack says. 

  “No, you’re not.” She grins. 

Jack looked at me, crooks his eyebrows, and boldly said, “I bet I can kiss her right now.”

Our lips meet in a delicate, yet passionate union and the local woman stood up and started waving her hands. 

“Stop! Stop! I am getting jealous!” 

And suddenly the three of us were three-way kissing before Jack put a stop to it and burst out laughing. Zoe Kravitz slid onto his lap, wrote her number on his arm and kissed him on the forehead before leaving. 

“Do people seriously just do that to you?” I asked. He just laughed, not denying it. 

Jack took my hand and we ran off together, I don’t know where we are going but I pre-planned how we would go back to my hotel and finally make love under the moon. We stopped outside a fancy-looking restaurant that was blasting ABBA through its speakers and we danced until they open the gate and invite us in. The room was lavish and warm, and the Italian chefs and staff were all dressed to the nines. They were sitting in the leather booths grooving out. They didn’t say anything but cut a line of white powder onto the table and Jack did the whole thing.

 “Be careful, the chefs do that shit for breakfast,” a man told us and Jack slipped his hand in between my legs slurring that he needs to go.

I brought him home and laid his long body out in my bed. He could barely hold eye contact and told me he’d always had a special place for me in his heart. When he opened his eyes, I thought this is it. This is our moment. Instead, he vomitted all over himself, the bed, the wall and everything in between. I cleaned him and it all up murmuring that it’s okay as he told me “I’m so sorry” over and over again.  I got back into the bed and we clasp our hands together, laying so close our noses are touching and I fall blissfully asleep. In the morning, we wake and he shakes the night off and me along with it. I try to bring up our kiss and he tells me it was just to shoo the other woman away. I nod like I was in on the whole thing. Always knowing my part. Dedicated to the role of side character.

The last time I saw Jack was after the boy I was dating that summer dropped me off on the west coast before my camping trip. Jack and I ran into each other at the Granville Market and he invited me to join a party at his house. It was out in the skinny patch of yard of his rundown, well-broken-in-character home off Commercial Drive. He shared the house with five of his closest friends. It seemed like a fun, lively house. I had brought cheese from Granville Island, which I told the guests was a “$20-dollar piece of cheese I got for free!” All thanks to my charm and a cute cheese stall worker who was the supporting character of my market girl adventure. A group of Jack’s friends came over to the house. The group was boisterous and you could tell they were good pals. I tried to get a few words in, the only way one can as an outsider. We served ourselves a feast of beautifully laid out pasta and chicken, the $20 free cheese and wine.

They all decide later that night to go to the Funky Winker Pinker bar for karaoke. Some of his friends were interested in me but I didn’t pay them much attention with Jack around. I don’t drink much anymore but I found myself quite intoxicated at the end of the night. Jack told me I could sleep in his bed with him at his house. But then later he opened the door to his roommate’s bedroom down the hall and told me “Good night! I love you!”

I sat on his roommate’s bed and decided this is not how the story goes. I walked down the hall and knocked on his door. He was playing the piano and I told him

“Jack, I am too broken-hearted to sleep alone.” 

He told me that’s fine, so I crawled into his bed as he continues to play the tune “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” I looked out the open window at the sun rising over the city and fell asleep. The next morning, I woke up and looked over at Jack. A shaft of sunlight blanketed his slow breathing and naked upper body. He opened his eyes, and we chatted for a bit about the night, and he started reading Charles Bukowski’s love poems. He stopped to tell me all about this girl he just met. How pretty and how cool she was. That he got so nervous talking to her and she made him feel like a crazy person because he was always imagining all these different life scenarios together.

Back in Dr.Suziki’s office, I basically spit at my therapist pointing.

 “It made me think about how he doesn’t even know this girl! He is just in love with this idea he has of her.” 

Dr. Suzuki narrows his eyes and tells me, “Hold that.” He stands and brings a rectangular object over and spins it around. It’s a mirror. 

  “You have three fingers pointing back at you,” he tells me. 

And in that moment, it all hits me. I realize that this boy has never seen me cast in the same glow. I am not the main character of his fantasies and he doesn’t dream of me. He probably doesn’t spend any time thinking much about me at all. I wonder if it’s him I like or if it’s just the idea of him wanting me more. He’s chasing his power through somebody else and so am I. And maybe he’s always just been the boy that comes back into my life again and again, waiting to see if I have learned my lesson yet. That I don’t need to be chosen to have worth. That I don’t need to be let into the cool crew. I felt something inside of me open, hands that I had clenched for years, began to unfurl and unclasp. Fingers that were held so tight for so long it was like they were going to snap. 

“You have to stop putting people on a pedestal,” Dr. Suzuki tells me. “When we do that, we are meeting people with a need, not allowing ourselves but also them to just show up as who they really are. Maybe when he comes to your dinner party tonight, he can just show up as himself and so can you. Maybe it will be the first time you really meet.” 

I scoff. 

“Don’t you want inner peace?” He pleads.

“Don’t you want pants that fit?” I retort back. 

It’s 6:00 pm and everything is laid out perfectly. The chicken tagine with simmered bits of apricots, ribboned zucchini, and preserved lemon. The couscous is perfectly fluffy. There’s handmade pita and tabouli. The red wine is already poured and airing out. I have every conversation lined up, questions I will ask planned and the looks I will give upon response.

“What are you doing for the rest of your life” starts playing through the record player, and I go to the bathroom and I stare into my own eyes. Taking it all in, myself in that moment and all the words Dr. Suzuki had said. All the moments in my life that have led me to this one. My blue hair is sticking out in all the wrong directions. If I was just for myself, I wouldn’t care and I wonder when I will just be enough for myself. I keep staring into my blue eyes and at my blue hair and I notice the clippers in the corner. 

I pick it up and start to sway. I turn them on and feel the electric rush of the buzz in my hand and I don’t break eye contact with myself as I shave my head in perfect rows. Like crops in a field at harvest. The hair falls into bundled chunks onto the floor. After it’s all off I sweep it up into the dustpan. I don’t look at myself in the mirror again. I light the candles on the table and look out at the dark waters of the sea. I hear a knock at the door and go down the stairs to open it. “Welcome!” I say, beaming like a star.