Follicle

Follicle I just gave my brother our semi-annual haircutting sessions yesterday. For every six months, I moonlight as a barber giving my brothers a trim or a new style, for free. I honestly do not know what brought that on because ever since my brother came home from Singapore late last year, I’ve been giving them these haircuts because they’ve been too lazy and too cheap to go to the barbershop.

I watched hairs fall onto the ground, then swept and gathered to throw away in the trash. I watched my brother brush off the bits of hair that got stuck into the folds of his t-shirt, his neck, and arms because if he won’t, then he would have to suffer the itchiness it would cause and he would have to undergo the agony of scratching it till it goes away and his skin would be raw by then.

How you could set the time by how long your hair or nails grow. It’s the most latent way of telling us that time had passed and how. My hair now almost reaches the small of my back. Scrutinizing it, one could see the ends split, needing a trim badly but I’m in no hurry to cut, unlike some other people. Have you ever realized that that wear and tear in our hair are a life’s worth of pain resulting from the harshness of the elements and not taking care of it properly?

I prefer the discretion of it against the tic-toc of the clocks that are strategically hung around our house. I feel that somehow, like the curse of the Deathwatch Beetle, I’m doomed every second that passed by. Those cuckoo clocks that cluck every hour (yet sounds like a Banshee wailing to my ears) announces another fraction of my life gone by and that I will never capture again.

Immortality. We all crave that do we?

Like the hairs that are cut from us and the nails that we clip that are swept and thrown represents the years in our life that is now lost.

So we take precautions in to prevent these damages. We try to live cautiously.

I have a friend who still can’t cross the street at the age of 22. Even I, when I reached my 21st birthday realized that I am not as invincible as I think I was when I was younger. I became more responsible, for myself and for others and in return I became more frozen. I tried to retreat in the corners because open spaces have this big potentiality of getting your heart broken, or becoming disappointed. The bigger the space, the bigger the risk.

But I still think that we should do something that we are most afraid of, even if it paralyzes us or worse, kill us. Everything in this world is a risk even if you think that you are safely ensconced in the security of your house. Paralysis can be cured with therapy and conditioning but death. Death, we cannot do anything about it but at least we could earn our bragging right in the afterlife, wherever that is.

Being frozen from far too long is a risk; we may get stale. Then it would all be for nothing.

I told Karen a few days ago that we humans tend to survive without actually living and having said that out loud, I was horrified at the thought.

Tomorrow I’m going to the salon. I’m going to have my split ends trimmed.