The last thing I said before the haircut started was, “Just the ends.”
This is a phrase I've said many times, and I don't know why I keep expecting it to mean the same thing to everyone.
I went to the salon on a Wednesday because I had a dentist appointment nearby and thought I might as well make a day of the neighborhood. The salon was a small place in Mexico City with two chairs, a fan near the door, and a shelf full of hair products arranged by color rather than by any system I could understand.
My appointment was at eleven. I arrived at ten fifty-eight. Someone was eating a pastry behind the counter. The woman cutting hair looked up and said, “Dame cinco minutos.” Give me five minutes. Reasonable enough.
I sat beside a stack of magazines from several years ago and tried not to look at the pictures of elaborate haircuts. I had come in with one job: get rid of the dry ends before my cousin's birthday dinner on Saturday. No bangs. No dramatic layers. No “fresh start.”
The stylist, Verónica, took one look at my hair and asked whether I always wore it in a bun.
“Only on days ending in y,” I said.
She laughed. “Okay. How much are we cutting?”
“Two centimeters.” I held up two fingers as if I were describing the size of a fish.
“That's not very much.”
“Exactly.”
She washed my hair, wrapped a towel around my shoulders, and turned the chair away from the mirror. I spent the next twenty minutes looking at a poster of a woman with extremely shiny hair while we talked about things that had nothing to do with mine: the roadwork outside, a neighbor who kept leaving deliveries at the wrong apartment, and whether it was actually going to rain that afternoon.
Every now and then Verónica lifted a section of hair and asked a question. I said yes to something about layers. Then I wondered what, specifically, I'd agreed to. I could have asked. Instead I said, “Sure,” which was not an improvement.
When she turned me toward the mirror, I did not look terrible. That's an important distinction. The haircut was good. It was just significantly more of a haircut than the haircut I had pictured.
The ends were gone. So was a reasonable amount of the middle.
“Do you like it?” Verónica asked.
“Yes,” I said, then tried to find a more accurate answer. “I think I need to see it when it's not professionally dried.”
“Fair.”
I paid, put on my glasses, and went outside. The wind immediately blew the front pieces into my mouth. I tucked them behind my ears, where they stayed for roughly a second. On the sidewalk I took a picture for my sister, who lives in Querétaro and considers herself the family's unofficial hair consultant.
Her reply arrived before I reached the corner.
You look younger.
I stared at it. Younger is not a haircut description. It can mean almost anything.
Me: Do I look like I asked for two centimeters?
Her: No lol.
Then she called me. She wanted to see the back. I stood beside a pharmacy window trying to use my phone camera to photograph the back of my own head, which is an activity I do not recommend in public.
“Turn around,” she said.
“I AM turned around.”
“Your phone is turned around. You aren't.”
A man passing with a bag of groceries gave me a wide berth.
After the call I went to pick up a package from a shop a few blocks away. The woman at the counter asked for my name, handed me a box, and did not comment on my hair. I appreciated her professionalism.
By late afternoon, with my hair no longer obeying the blow-dry, I liked it more. Not because it looked like the photo I'd shown Verónica—it didn't—but because it was now sitting on my actual head, in my actual life, with a little humidity and the strap of my bag messing it up.
At home I washed a mug, answered a few messages, and found three more photos from my sister. Two showed hairstyles she thought might work “next time.” The third was a photo of her lunch.
I sent her a picture of my dinner: leftover rice, one fried egg, and an aggressively small amount of avocado.
She replied, Looks great.
I still don't know whether she meant the food or the hair.