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nothing good gets away.

[john steinbeck]

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I cut off all my hair this summer in a frenzy of self-actualization. And moments like that are good, and necessary. They can purge us in an instant of months or years of sedentary spirits. Sometimes you just need to back a dump truck up to your apartment, buy a one-way ticket to San Paulo, give the ring back.

I'm so on board. It's just that no one ever tells you about growing out the mullet.

I meant to donate the braid but I couldn't afford the postage, so I threw it in the back of my car and moved to Colorado. My hair still looked great but it didn't matter, because this state could make Woody Allen feel sexy as hell. I didn't have a job for a few months, and spent those days walking through mountains and woods with my dog and steadily working my way through all the black tea in our house. I didn't even notice the leaves beginning to fall.

Then winter took everything, suddenly, shrouding this new life in a film of white, and all the cold things remembered where I was and hitched up the mountain to this tucked-away town. I realized that my hair wasn't the only part of me that was dead, and the heartbreak filtered into my soul like low-level carcinogen poisoning, the kind that you get only because you refuse to stop throwing your Nalgene in the dishwasher.

I wanted to be happy that I'd closed a hollow chapter in my life, one that would never let me become the woman I want to be, but I wasn't. I wanted so badly to open it back up and flip through the pages, find something to salvage. I couldn't see the meaning of these days and weeks in a Colorado mountain town buried in winter, so I tried to raise it up out of my past. But those roads were all closed, as dangerously changed as the ones packed in ice under my feet.

And it sounds stupid, but I felt like my hair was one of my last lines of defense, and in a fit of terrible timing I'd cut it off my head and lost it somewhere in my trunk right before heading off into the unknown. My hair was part of my old identity, something people liked about me even when they thought I had bad taste in t-shirts. I felt like this season of my life was another breakaway gone horribly wrong, and I wanted to keep this hidden in my heart, but my Justin Bieber hair kept betraying me.

The ragged hairline crept down my neck and the snow piled up foot by foot outside, and I felt so far from the voice of God that I started watching all the seasons I own of Friday Night Lights and eating spinach dip with my bare hands. These months were cold inside and out, and the kindest thing I could think of to do was to ignore my hibernating heart and my reflection in the mirror.

But here's the point. I woke up a week ago, after months of bad hair and failing spirit. And it was still cold outside, and everything seemed like it should be the same. But it wasn't. It wasn't at all.

Norah bounded around the fence and into the street, and I stood and tried to figure out what it was, whether it was the quality of the light or the way the air moved on my face. My neighbor from down the street waved, and his dog bulldozed mine over, and the porch step murmured under my shifted weight, and I just knew. Winter was over.

I still don't know how this message is carried to our bodies and burdens, but last week this high, cold swath of the earth changed, and I felt it body and soul. Something triggered this signal in my blood, and for the first time in months, I felt warm. I liked my hair. I wanted to crash a party and eat shrimp tacos and rich wet plums, press my palms flat against the earth and kiss the ground.

Moments like that, when you feel the weight of the braid in your hand, they are wonderful. But the whole fact of their beauty lies in the days and weeks after, the terror and slow growth, the nights you cry so hard your blood feels thinner and the times you can't speak because you feel so meant to be.

Maybe sometimes your life has to look different for a while before you can be different, and that's okay. Sometimes when you finally decide to change, to give it over, to lay it down, the world will change for you.