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For the first time in my life, there’s silence.
It’s a good type of silence, something that fills up the spaces between empty promises and false hopes. A silence that makes my brain feel empty, makes me forget about all the problems I have to deal with.
The ceiling’s in as happy of a mood as I am, shifting to an image of a bright blue sky, complete with wispy white clouds. The clouds move steadily across the surface, occasionally transforming into random geometrical patterns. Once or twice, I even spot the team logo.
Not to mention my phone hasn’t buzzed once. I check, then double check the calendar.
Nothing.
No team meetings, no games, no sponsorships, no events to get ready for and dread trying to walk around in four inch heels and the shortest dress imaginable. It almost feels unreal.
I know what I want to do.
“ Would you be able to help me?” I ask, holding up the bag for her to see. She’s sitting cross-legged on the couch, a laptop propped up on one knee. A game of online chess.
As I watch, she slowly check mates, then looks first at me, then at the bag.
“ Is it drugs? Please tell me it’s not drugs. Cause if it’s that, then no,” she says plainly.
I spill the contents of the bag on the couch. Her eyes widen.
“ Sure, why not, I’ll help,” she finally says. “ Can’t promise it’s gonna be amazing, I’ve never dyed hair before. But I’ll try my best.”
“ I used to help my sister braid her hair,” she tells me, carefully painting the bleach onto my roots. It’s been too long since I’ve last done my hair properly; I forgot how bad the bleach smells. “ She was always very, you know, hyper, wiggling around all the time and all that stuff. And I wasn’t very good at doing her hair to begin with,” she laughs. “ Here I thought it would be easy since I was good at chess- the coordination and dexterity of the fingers, the quick flawless movements- but it was different on an actual live person. Especially when it’s your little sister.”
“ What happened?” I ask.
“ I ended up with extremely stiff braids,” she replies, miming with her hands. “ All sorts of angles and directions. Not to mention that I basically damaged the hair up really badly. Ugh, it was a mess.” She shakes her head. “ I don’t want to think about it. I think I can still see it in my nightmares. Here, your bleaching is done.”
She crosses over to the bathroom sink to wash her hands. I settle onto the floor.
“ Did you-?” I start to say.
“ Get my mom? Yeah, she fixed it.” She sits down on the floor next to me. “ Thank goodness for her and her hair skills. And for everything else too…” she sighs, leaning her head onto the cool tile of the wall. “ She taught me everything I know- chess, gaming, cooking, how to kick guys in the balls… anything you could think of, she had the knowledge.”
“ Same here,” I reply. “ My dad’s all who I had. He used to put color streaks in my hair when I was a little kid, when I would come home from school and cry because of the people there.”
“ Yeah, little kids are the worst.”
“ And he would make sure that I wasn’t hurt badly or would help me put bandaids on when I did have a cut or scrape or something. Then he would take me out for ice cream or to the aquarium. Just something to get my mind off of it. Something to help me realize that there’s more things in life than just stupid and cruel people.”
“ That there’s still beauty among the suffering?” She finishes.
“ Exactly.”
She’s silent, twirling a curl around her finger.
“ So that’s what this hair is for?” She asks me a little while later, sectioning off my hair into tiny parts and starting to spread color on the first section. “ A reminder of your dad?”
“ Yeah. Well, his hair was blue for most of my life. And I tried that but it just looked gross on me, you know? And I felt like it didn’t match the vibrant personality I remember him having.” I continue. “ And all his paintings…”
“ He painted?”
“ Yeah, it was incredible. All his paintings were bursting with color and shapes and just…. You could see all the emotion that went into it. And most people were just like “ it’s abstract art and a kindergartner could do abstract art” but me? I loved them. And so did other people eventually.”
“ I’d love to see them someday.” She says.
If only she could.
“ Is there anyway you could buy them back?” She asks after I tell her. She’s moved on to the back of my head now. The already-dyed hair sticks to the back of my shirt.
I shake my head.
“ I’d love to paint like him, but… I just don’t have that same talent.” The words seem to pop out of my mouth automatically. “ And I’ve tried… like, I used to sit there with crayons and paper and pencils and just try to… imagine what was going through his mind as he painted. And I would try to somehow put that on paper.”
The memory is still vivid in my mind; I don’t even need the technology to remember it. It was in the few days before the foster home, sitting in the living room of the apartment dad and I shared. Some of his paintings in progress were propped up on the wall, while others hung in fancy-looking frames.
All I could do was stare at them, hoping that if I sat there long enough, I would be sucked into the world beyond the painting. That somewhere, among those many worlds, my dad would be waiting for me.
I wanted to be like him. I wanted his carefree spirit, his thoughts that “ life was short and do what makes you happy.” The fact that he tried his best to involve me in everything that he did, or that he always tried to cheer me up as best as he could, even when he was having a bad day. He always filled up our apartment with flowers and let me have sips of his wine when I was little. And most of all, there were the paintings.
“ I just couldn’t reach that level of imagination,” I tell her. “ I tried and tried and basically cried out of frustration sometimes, but still… I couldn’t come close.” The paintbrushes always felt foreign in my hands, the paint seemed to go wherever it wanted on the canvas. It wasn’t like coding, where I could imagine where everything clicked into place. Where I could see the final product in my mind’s eye. It was just… different.
“ That’s how it feels with my mom,” she pipes up. She sits down next to me again, the most recent dye bowl lying next to her. Her fingertips are stained purple.
“ So… she taught me how to play chess in the first place. And I ended up getting pretty good, won some competitions and everything.” She plucks at her shirt. “ She was always there if I had questions, or if I needed tips. She was the sole reason why I got so good. And those times I did lose a match? She did kind of what your dad did; she would take my sister and I out to a coffee shop and let us pretend to be grown-ups with mugs of coffee. Or she would take us to the store, and we would be able to pick out as much candy or toys or whatever that we wanted.” Her voice softens. “ And then she would give us hugs, tell us that the world is bigger than we know and that we were special to her no matter what happened. No matter what achievements we got or didn’t get, we had to remember we were never failures in her eyes.”
She falls silent, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. It’s quite shocking, I’ve never seen her cry before. It’s like I’m looking at a totally different person than the one that I previously knew.
“ But I never got as good as her,” she continues. “ My mom seemed to have it all. The good looks, the talents, the personality… but me? All I had was chess and even then, I never reached her level.”
Her phone lets out a loud chime, alerting us that the hair dye was done processing.
I let her grab hold of the hand-held shower, gently running the water over the dye for me. The colored water pools around the drain in a mix of colors; a vibrant, swirling rainbow.
There’s something about having someone help you. There’s something about being able to talk to someone, finding out that the two of you are similar than you have ever realized. Those small moments of human connection…it’s better than I could ever hope for.
“ I think your mom would be proud of you,” I tell her, staring in the mirror at the fresh rainbow dye. It seems to be even more vibrant than it ever has before. Maybe she has the magic touch after all.
“ It did turn out well,” she replies. “ I was surprised.”
“ You did amazing.”
She smiles, standing next to me and placing her hands on my shoulders. We stare at our reflections in the mirror, her round face and halo of brown curly hair and my pale skin and multicolored hair. So alike yet so different.
“ I think your dad would be proud of you too,” she finally says. “ How much you’ve been inspired by him.”
I picture Dad in my mind. I picture his excitement over the idea of rainbow hair, the trips that we would take to get boxes upon boxes of hair dye. Knowing him, he would insist on doing his hair at the same time. “ It’s like a father-daughter hangout” he would say, grabbing boxes for himself. He would spend way more money than he actually had in order to get all the supplies we need. And then the day would come and we would spend it together, talking and laughing.
Before I know it, I start to tear up.
She peers at me. “ Oh my gosh, did I make you cry? I am so sorry.”
“ No, it’s okay,” I say. “ I think both of our parents would be proud of us.”
We couldn’t be exactly like them, but at least we could come close. And maybe that was enough.