hair

Most of the time, she really liked her hair.

Her bangs were her favorite part. They were angled in such a way that they were shorter over her left eye, where her part was. They swooped over to the right, resting on the hinge of her glasses so that throughout the day they sort of crimped and curved to fit the shape her constant head-tossing forced them into.

She liked the bits right in front of her ears too. When she put her glasses on, she would hook her fingers up under the temples and pull those sections of hair down to fall in front of her ears and frame her jaw. Before she got a hair dryer, she would wait to do it until her hair had dried, so the bits would end up curved outwards from being forced behind her ears from her glasses.

She liked the color. Most of the time, that is. She had been dying it various kinds of red since tenth grade, and it had been so long since she'd really seen her natural hair color she was convinced it was an unflattering color. All she remembered of it was it was dark brown and boring. Once she had bleached her hair and dyed it bright orange, but that had faded to a kind of dried wheat and her roots had grown out. She liked to forget that hadn't happened, it had looked so strange.

Currently, her hair was a dark auburn. She liked how no matter how much she dyed it, her hair retained its natural highlights. She wasn't sure if it was just her hair, or if it was because she preferred natural dyes to the chemical ones.

She liked how it was cut, for the most part. If there wasn't a need to keep it the same until August, though, she knew she'd have someone cut it different, just for the change. Her bangs sloped down on both sides at different angles to a bob that hovered just above her shoulders. And every time she blow dried it, or washed it, she fretted over the length. The style was fine, it was the length that was getting bothersome. It hadn't been quite that long since the last time it had been brown. She would frequently feel the need to pull it back into some semblance of a ponytail, which more often than not ended up as a blob of hair held haphazardly up with an elastic. Recently, during a particularly boring math class, she had french braided her bangs from her part down the right side of her head and behind her ear. She wasn't sure if it looked right, but it served its purpose.

But mostly she liked how, when it was smooth and slightly curled from her new round brush, it would fall just so and she'd see someone that wasn't quite her but someone more.