natural Q I especially like natural ways of using muscles. 020330 ... lulie Searching Don't you know I'm hell yeah For an answer To the question Oh yeah For our minds Baby Baby it's true It's only natural It's only natural baby, yeah Good things In life Take a long time (Chicago VII) 020330 ... tender square i used to be so blonde growing up that my hair was like saskatchewan wheat. i wore it long and my mom would give me fancy updos for school picture day and dance recitals, french braiding my hair as i hung my head upside down, curling my bangs and using enough aerosol hairspray to create a bigger hole in the ozone. my hair is thin, much like my mother’s. it lays limp most days unless i put product in it. when i turned ten, i tried to learn how to work with it better, and my mom suggested highlights to give the strands more body and texture. my mom is so old school in her stylist training, she still doesn’t know the technique for foiling hair. she’d sit me in the kitchen wearing the thick plastic cap while she’d pull strands out with the highlighting needle, scraping my scalp with every yank. the purple dye would set under the hair drying stand she kept from her old salon and i’d wait for the results. i carried on highlighting for years, keeping my locks lighter even as my roots started to darken with time. in high school i went through all sort of phases: long hair, pixie cuts, brown hair, bobs, pink streaks. the experimenting continued well into my twenties. altering my hair always came with some new phase in my life; whenever i was itching for change, i’d embody it first with my mane. the last time i was blonde was five years ago. i had been using all-over box colors at home that gave my hair a brassy tone. it was a bit outlandish, but i liked how fake it looked while i worked a corporate job i hated, it felt suitable for the occasion. my cousin neutralized the damage at her salon a few weeks before my wedding. i was too cheap and lazy to keep up with the process every six weeks after, so i grew the dye out. it wasn’t really a conscious decision, more like a non-decision. for a while my shoulder-length hair looked really cool, like an unintentional balayage as my darker roots came in. then i simply decided to chop off some inches and wear it as a bob. i didn’t have the stylist dye it; without the blond tips, my natural color had evolved into a dark, dirty blonde. i had tawny tresses and i liked it. when the pandemic started, i stopped getting haircuts entirely and it grew eight inches. it’s still growing. i’m trying to see if i can get it to the length i had when i was eight, mid-chest region, but i don’t know how long it will take. my mom still marvels at my hair each time she sees me—“how are you this dark?” she says that i remind her of her father; bright as a child but darker as an adult. i found my first grey hair this summer, though michael claims he can’t really see it. and maybe it’s a weird thing to wish for but i want more of them. my mother and grandmother both have hair that has settled into a beautiful slate. it radiates with each passing year. 210910 what's it to you? who go blather from