Most people wouldn’t consider it a compliment if you walked up to them and said, “You look like the heroin of an 80s slasher movie.” But as I looked into the mirror and said it to myself, I knew that this was what euphoria felt like. It was an insignificant detail— just a tuft of hair over my forehead, resulting from a panicked decision to cut a strand off the front when I needed a fast fix for a marching band-related wardrobe malfunction. For the longest time, I hated that little tuft. It stuck out like the hair on Tintin’s head— a mistake from a rushed solution to an easy problem. I thought it made me look childish, even insane. I spent more than a reasonable amount of time going over the damn strand with a brush, over and over again.
Then the pandemic hit. I wasn’t required to go out in public anymore. I decided to take the opportunity to let the fucker grow out and stop annoying me. And that was what brought me to that morning, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. The paradoxical angst my beard filled me with was suddenly balanced out by the set of bangs that had grown in, replacing the annoying little strand I hated so much.
Most people would probably call the hairstyle tacky— let’s face it, most things that were popular in the 80s were, but as I saw the same style of bangs on myself that Molly Ringwald had worn in Sixteen Candles, I was filled with something like joy. I’ve never felt anything that I would call a “warm fuzzy,” but this definitely came close. What immediately followed was a day filled with YouTube tutorials and periods of vanity that the me from yesterday would never have engaged in (I don’t like to look at myself that much).
It was such a small moment, but it spoke volumes. Like many nonbinary people, I never felt “nonbinary enough,” and at times my apathy toward appearance, toward pronouns, toward fashion, made every element of my being feel so fake, like every question I had asked myself about my gender had simply been a way of swapping the mask of my masculinity in for an exact copy with the words “they/them” written across it. But all of that melted away when I saw those bangs and felt that elation.
This happened yesterday, relative to my writing this, and I don’t know how long the euphoria will last, but it’s nice to have a point of certainty to cling to.
Ben Ashley Kilgore is an undergraduate majoring in creative writing and piano performance at NMSU. They have been published in various small, school-based publications such as The Crimson Thread and the CSSSA Creative Writing Anthology.
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