When You Were Young, And On Your Own, How Did It Feel, To Be Alone? I Was Always Thinking, Of Games That I Was Playing

--"Only Love Can Break Your Heart (cover)", St. Etienne

I dyed my hair for the umpteenth time today. It really struck me that I've been doing this particular act off and on for quite a while now. I mean--I started noticing I was getting gray hairs as far back as the sixth grade. Back then, I never did anything about it because one really had to search through my tangled tresses to find even one or two specimens. But as the years started to add up I started to notice that I would get them more frequently. Maybe it's just the fact my natural hair color is coal black that they show up so easily in contrast, but it often felt like to me that I got more than my fair share of them far younger than I should have.

I began to experiment with dying it to cover up the fact I was getting them at all. It wasn't a vanity project (or maybe it was); I didn't care particularly that it made me look older or out of place with my peers. The reason I ostensibly dyed it was because I've always had an aversion to growing up too fast. The Breannes of the world might have quested for being recognized as an adult in their youth, but I was always of the mindset that my youth was slipping far too quickly. Getting gray hairs was only one sign of it. Luckily, it was the one sign that I could do something about. I never dyed it religiously. However, as soon as I thought it was getting too out of control for its own good, I would come along and blend it black or brown, whatever the case may be. It was my way of slowing the signs of aging in a misguided attempt to pretend I wasn't as mature as I really was. I couldn't do anything about the fact my friends were moving away or going on with their own lives; I couldn't do anything about having to get a job or finding my own place; and I couldn't do anything about people my age dying, either in the news or in my actual life. But, goddamn it all, I could do something about my own hair.

The thing is that no matter how often I dyed my hair, it would always go gray in parts again. Just like as often as I try to avoid the subject of my life changing all the time, there's nothing I can do to fix it in place, to secure it exactly as I want to remain. Like they said on Avonlea, "Nothing endures but change," and it seems like my life changes quicker than most. Well, actually, that's not true. It seems the life around me changes than most. DeAnn and Breanne (ha, that rhymes) get married; all of my friends that I had in high school move to other parts of the country; and my love life seems to fluctuate between tumultuous at best to being non-existent. Yet I seem stuck in the same persistent state of lackadaisical living that I've always adhered to. I try to change as little as possible about my day-to-day routine as I possibly can. Even my profiles state that all I do is "eat, watch, read, write, and travel." Aside from the traveling, those activities don't lend itself to much experimentation. I could literally eat, watch, read, and write all the same things for the rest of my life and not be any more happy or less happy than I am now. That isn't to say I don't try new things; it just means the discovery is the least enticing aspect of finding something new under the sun. For me, the best facet of finding something new is the working of it into my daily routine, the covering up of the fact that it was ever outside of my routine.

The more I try, though, the more I realize that I'm playing a game with time that I can't possibly win. There are parts to my routine that simply can't go on as they are. I'm losing touch with what makes living a life and leading a life different from each other. I'm letting the world outside myself dictate how I live; I'm reacting to stimuli instead of acting apart from it. There's going to come a point where everything will fall apart and my routine, my comfort zone, is just not going to hold up under scrutiny.

There's going to come a point where covering up that my life is changing everyday with a bit of color and polish is not going to do the trick anymore. There's going to come a point where my age and the years of neglecting the years that have gotten me this far are going to catch up to me once and for all.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers