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It’s a good question, for people who have only known me for 3 years or so. For everyone else, it likely doesn’t come as a shock that I chopped off so much hair. You see, when I was 14 I started cutting my hair short. It stayed like that until I decided in September 2006 that it was time to start fresh and make a legitimate attempt at growing out my hair. So I shaved my head. Really.

It wasn’t exactly a bad look, but it wasn’t for me, long term. I shaved my head with a goal in mind – to grow mermaid hair. So, for nearly 4 years I let my hair grow. I threw away my razor for short haircuts and started booking appointments at salons.

My hair grew and people liked it. I even liked it. But, I have to tell you, all that long hair that I’d worked so long to grow often got pulled back, and most of the time I looked something like this:

And really, what’s the point of long hair when it’s always up? The longer it got, the more annoying I found it. Drains were always clogging; hair would get stuck all over me in the shower and I could never get it off; long strands were constantly ending up in my ink and then on my type, messing up my prints; it’d get stuck in the strap of my messenger bag; you get the point.

As preparation for the Art Star Craft Bazaar chugged along, I got stressed, and I knew I had to do something drastic. The only surefire cure for my deadline induced stress has always been a self haircut, so I grabbed my scissors and went to town. First I trimmed it to my shoulders, but that wasn’t enough. The next day I cut it to my chin. That satisfied me for about a week, but the night before ASCB I went all the way.

It was strange at first, and I felt an instant twinge of regret, but I also felt a really satisfying feeling of being “myself” again. And this is what I was trying to get at with this whole post when I started. If you’ve made it this far, thank you! If not, I understand. Anyway, the point is this: So many people in my the current version of my life didn’t know that girl in this last photo. They still know ME, sure, but only to an extent. As much as I enjoyed my stint with long hair, I’m just a short-haired girl at heart. I always felt a little bit like I was pretending, like I was wearing a wig, when my hair was long. I always felt better when it was pulled up. I always felt more like me.

Today I chopped my hair a little more. It’s what I do when my hair is short, constantly tweak the cut – because I can do it myself. I like that it’s something I can control in my life, that I can maintain and manage without anyone else’s assistance. And yea, this is a really long post about something as simple as a haircut, but guess what? I don’t care.

There are two distinct sides of my personality: the cynic who firmly believes that love will never find her and the hopeless romantic who swoons over the thought of sweet nothings, love letters, other halves, soul mates, etc. Generally I side with the cynic. I am picky, nearly impossible to please; dropping men for the way they pronounce words, a face they make, the shine on their skin, their complicated dietary restrictions – the most minute things can prevent my happiness. And yet, that other part of me is always hoping, always searching for my match, my other half, the person who will be perfectly imperfect in my eyes.

I measure coincidences and search for the message the Universe is trying to send me. I read my horoscope {I’m an Aquarius} and match my sign with the sign of each potential mate. I don’t necessarily believe every word that I read, but I enjoy the insight it provides and often times I find that it’s relatively accurate.  My dear friend Avalon Clare turned me on to the Enneagram {I’m a 6} and so recently I’ve been using that for insight also. These things are all relative, and I find myself embarrassed to admit that they are important to me at times, but what’s the point of that? I am a bit superstitious, I am a lover of some mystical things. I make wishes when the numbers on the clock are all the same, I insist that others make wishes when I find a stray eyelash on their cheek, I play games in my head with certain numbers – all of these things are my way to make sense of this crazy world we live in.

Maybe you’re wondering what my point is here, where I’m going with this. The hopeless romantic in me has always wanted to believe in true love, in other halves, in perfect storms; the cynic in me has always shot that all down and guarded me against it. There has been an interesting, and constant, war being waged within my body.

Until now. Now I am wrapped up in that perfect storm. My life has been filled with magical coincidences for the last eleven days and though it feels a little crazy for me to say this, especially in so public a forum, I feel there’s no other option anymore – I’m in love. I am head over heels, life-alteringly in love and I don’t think it will ever stop. It’s important to me to acknowledge how serendipitous my life is right now – though it’s been this way for several months, to be sure – and how it feels as if the Universe has finally put all the pieces of this puzzle of my life within my reach, while gently urging me to piece it together.

You see, my new gentleman {D, for short} and I,  have been circling around each other for many years. We have had a series of near misses, close calls, narrow escapes. The only conclusion that we can both come to based on the information that has been slowly revealing itself to us is that we were never ready before now. It would never have worked like this, never would have blossomed, unfolded, spread before us like this, warm and welcoming and feeling absolutely right. We decided several days after meeting each other that we had no choice in this, we couldn’t do anything but let it happen to us and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Each day one more perfect thing about D, about he and I together, materializes and we look at each other in amazement, big stupid grins filling our faces.

I expect most people to roll their eyes at me. I expect them to say “we’ll see” or “good luck with that,” sarcasm dripping from their mouths – and I can’t blame them. I just hope they’re ready to hear me say “I told you so” in a few years when this is all still unfolding, when I am sitting calmly in the eye of my perfect storm, when I am happily existing with my other half.