Always.

I have never had short hair before.

That identity belonged to someone else.

Someone else to whom I was inextricably linked yet completely opposite to.

Complimentary yes.

But not the same.

She had short hair, a bob.

And I had long waves.

Always.

One day I found myself a little tired of this sense of always.

So I cut those long waves off.

On a whim.

At midnight.

With the scissors from the kitchen drawer.

Afterward it occurred to me that I had always been a somewhat passive decision maker.

I didn't ever necessarily want to have long hair.

It had just always been that way.

Cutting it all off wasn't an attempt to be like her.

Although,

perhaps in some small way,

it was an attempt to be a little more yang.

When I was

Perpetually

So very yin.

That's just the way it was.

And so it stayed that way.

As I looked in the mirror one morning I saw her.

I remembered how both sides of her bob, the pieces that framed her face, swung in the same direction.

One side hooked under her chin.

Whilst the other bounced away from her.

As if it had spent the whole time tucked behind an ear.

How she would stand in the bathroom

At the basin

In front of the mirror.

Trying

And failing

To water both sides down in an attempt to tame them.

And so it was, in that very moment,

Observing my new haircut.

I had a thought that I'd dared not have in the almost 10 years since I saw her last.

As afraid as I had been -

- to live my life in a way that might leave her behind:

She would always be there.

That is was impossible that she could ever be far from my conscience.

That  it doesn't matter at all

with whom, how, when and where my life was being lived,

whether in the sense that she was present,

or the sense that she was absent

I would never fail to be surprised by where she might appear in my thoughts.

She would be there waiting for me to remember her.

Always.