I never thought that I would find myself attracted to a guy with long hair. In fact, usually when I meet a man with longer locks, I find myself slipping a not-so-subtle, and usually uncouth Fabio reference into conversation.
But there was something different about Christian. Maybe it was his dark Spanish skin, maybe it was his broad build, or maybe it was the rugged outdoorsman aura that seemed to naturally radiate from him; but regardless of these qualities, from the moment that I laid eyes on his loose brown ponytail, I knew that it, above all other physical qualities, was going to drive me wild. And to be honest, I think he knew it too.
So when playfully pushing back a lock of his hair one day, Christian grabbed my hand and half-jokingly asked me a question to which I wasn’t serious that I knew the answer.
“You would dump me if it weren’t for my hair, wouldn’t you?”
“No!” I squealed, pushing him over and trying my best to act offended.
“Really, babe,” he said, switching to a more somber tone. “My boss has been putting a lot of pressure on me to cut my hair – she thinks that it looks unprofessional.”
Despite my best efforts to appear more concerned about his situation than my own, my bias slipped through. Pairing this with his own attachment to his ponytail, Christian kissed my cheek and drew a comforting conclusion.
“Eh, screw ‘em. They can deal with it.”
Looking back, I should have realized that this episode held some sort of ominous foreshadowing – it was only a week later that I made a startling discovery that seemed to seal our relationship’s fate.
In my defense, anyone can get head lice. I don’t know, however, if just anyone can cater to them the way that I did – my thick hair must have looked like a heavenly nesting ground, and the buggers took full advantage. And let me tell you, this was a great way to start out my sophomore year of college.
Thankfully, Christian worked an hour away, and what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, or so I thought. So after a couple weeks of avoiding a visit while I worked with various applications and treatments for my own head – everything from over-the-counter shampoos to blow drying my scalp until it burned to coating my head in a thick layer of mayonnaise - confident that my head lice were all dead and gone, I finally decided that I should let him know.
But as I considered both the severity of my case and the fact that I had visited him the week prior to my unfortunate discovery, I realized that the there was a great possibility that I had passed them on to him as well. Too anxious to ask the fateful question over the phone and confident that my head was currently clean, I invited him to come visit that night.
To be honest, I would have rather told him that I was pregnant than the bomb that I was about to drop. Yes, I selfishly loved it myself, but Christian’s hair was his identity. The way that he washed and conditioned it, styled it, and flipped it around (in the manliest way possible, of course) sometimes made me wonder which he loved more – me or his hair. The possibility that I could have given him lice terrified me.
So of course, I was scared and danced around the question. “So, has your head been at all…itchy lately?”
He looked confused.
Gathering my confidence, I blurted, “I had head lice. Can I check your head?”
From the look on his face, I may as well have told him that I was pregnant.
No longer nervous about the initial blow, I took charge. Sitting him down in my chair, ignoring the continuous excuses still being mumbled from his mouth, I slid the hair tie off of the short ponytail that it loosely held together.
Reaching in, I only had to move one lock.
“Oh gosh,” I yelped, dropping the strands in time to see my worst fear feverishly burrow back into the mass of hair below.
Then, as quickly as he had come in, Christian was up and walking out the door, mumbling and keeping his eyes locked to the ground. “Alright, I gotta go. Gotta take care of this - gotta go.”
I couldn’t convince him to stay and let me help, even after I chased him down the stairs and into the parking lot. A few hours later, I received a text message: “They’re gone. Shaved my head. It’s all gone. I can’t believe it’s gone. My housemate has them too. But my hair is gone.”
I knew that the camp had probably made him shave his head; after all, no one would have been willing to comb it and his boss already had it in for his hair. I also knew that as two men, Christian and his roommate probably just took the most direct course of action – if something had to be done, they were going to do it right. But behind the rugged exterior, I knew that Christian was devastated.
We never spoke of the incident again.
Our relationship only lasted another month or so. I don’t know what ultimately killed it – maybe he was bitter that he thought I had given him lice; maybe his buzzed head was a constant reminder of the hours I had endured removing my own parasites. Maybe I had cursed us from the very beginning. Because while I don’t think that what was lacking in our relationship was his hair, I also know that when it fell, so did our romance.