006. on locs

I used to love my locs. The way the ones by my ears fell like tiny tendrils. The ways they were the same in all their differences, each one with a mind of its own. The way they changed, stayed the same.

The fattest loc was still the fattest loc. The longest, still the longest. I had cut the smallest ones, excised them for collecting too much lint visible to the naked eye. They were perfect once. They were never perfect. 

When the pandemic hit and it was clear we would be inside for some time, I decided to slow down the monthly maintenance. I was almost two years in by then, and it was always the goal to do the least when it came to them. Those first couple of months I washed my hair without retwisting it. It seemed fine at first but, eventually, the locs around the perimeter of my head seemed thinner than they had been. Maybe it was that there was nothing else to do, inside. I watched them carefully, meticulously, studying the way they looked from behind. Noticed the lint collecting in my kitchen.

I cut the faulty ones, felt immediate relief. It was short-lived. They grew back slowly, my interest elsewhere. By then I had taken to doing yoga every day, picking back up my hair’s regular maintenance, trimming often where things seemed uneven or weak. As my temples filled in, I formed new locs, tiny coils that grew into disobedient tufts, and eventually stalks, of hair. They stuck up this way and that way until I gave in and let them have their freedom.

It had been a little over a year since I trimmed them, four years total. The lint had not subsided but persisted. My patience waned. 

I got a slight undercut.  My love shaved the last row of stubborn locs that I had untangled and locked and cut and locked so many times. I felt more like myself. I was tempted to shave it all, but the stalks at my temples were so close to falling into the fold. A thing I had been working toward, though I knew I’d miss their stubbornness.

Initially when I researched locs, before getting them, I learned that it would sometimes take years for your mistakes to appear. More and more I’d been seeing weak points. Trimming off the end of a loc that was suddenly thinning near the end. I did it all the time, compromising length for health. Giving in to the lint accruing at the temples where the scarf slid off my head at night, despite my effort.

That temptation to cut was a persistent, unrelenting thought, but I kept telling myself not to give up so close to the goal. I wanted low-maintenance hair, and had it. My locs were mine. They had soaked in the sea back home, been touched by my now-dead grandmother's hands, my niece, my sister, my mother, my love, lovers I would never see again. I had loved myself in new and unfathomable ways with my locs. Because of them. I trusted I would again. What a gift they’d been. 

I had wondered what it would be like to love them, to love them as they were, to let them be. If I were kinder, more accepting, more intentional with them, with my body, my life. How one thing bleeds into the next, ‘cause so it goes. How to love myself when I am unpolished and imperfect because I would always be that. How hard it is and would continue to be, because I am the antithesis of most everything around me.

But I had learned how to love what had been faulted. What had been mocked. Learned how to let go. How to grieve. How to be with what is.  How to let go of what was. How to be content. How to accept. How accepting is not the same as settling, or allowing. How there is always room to grow and change. How there will be more love, like Yrsa, said. There will always be more love.