when you find a white hair

you might stand there with bare feet soaking up cold tile, and grow eyes large and incredulous, or else laugh in joy and passage-rite. And there might be a moment of disbelief or confusion: you might text your sister and save the strand in the cover of a book for keeping so she can inspect it when next she comes, to affirm or endorse, to disprove maybe, or perhaps even to bless. And while you’re waiting for her coming, you still sit down next to the reality that death is on its way for you. May I be honest here? It feels like cheating, to find a white hair when you’re still single and childless. These are thoughts about aging hair and imposter syndrome. It seems that erasure of The findings of such kinds of hair seem always tied to lived experiences comes my kids or the mortgage or in subtly horrible ways: scar cream and cellulite no thanks to the spouse. And I’m just wondering where the room is for all lotion, rigid belts for us folks to gather, those of rolling flesh, disguises for the laugh ridges of us who are growing whiteold without the usual impetuses. Or leastways, a late-night belly laughs. lower rate of the usuals. I’ve lived a semi-conventional life with spurts into non. And the defensive thought rises in me that I’ve earned that hair, though to whom I’m arguing is unclear (which is the great trick of impostering). This hair didn’t come from babies or fixed-year interest rates, but it did come from living, I say to the invisible they who circle around my choices and cast

judgment on the state of my savings account.

Who knows when this white one first sprouted? Was it at some moment during my airport strandings and

How I would love to unabashedly say let us

all denounce this! But still, I continue to shave my legs just the same.

language barrier obstacle courses? Or in the lengthening circles between bureaucratic offices and notarized form scavenger hunts?

Perhaps it was on the particularly harrowing thirty-hour round-trip flight over two days, to attend a funeral for which I was not prepared and wanted to happen even less. It could easily have grown in the New York days, where it’s possible to always pack in one more side hustle, one extra gig, the last two hundred for rent materializing in the scaly hard edges of city survival.

Or perhaps it came from taking on the burdens of Max and Ben, not my children but still very much my own. I can picture B’s face so clearly, eyes soft from crying and pudgy hand holding onto mine, his rocketship nightlight casting shadows in the wrong places. When his world grew out of proportion, or rather he for it, did I not look on in empathy, familiar with the squeeze of transitioning through to the next part, the next season, the next level of living?

When the white hair came is really immaterial, or so say the they who insist the battle now is hairward and nonnegotiable. Now becomes predatory. It seems that

erasure of lived experiences comes in subtly horrible ways: scar cream and cellulite lotion, rigid belts for rolling flesh, disguises for the laugh ridges of late-night belly laughs. How I would love to unabashedly say let us all denounce this! But still, I continue to shave my legs just the same.

And yet. But then. Or maybe even?

It occurs to me that the gatekeepers of living are largely imagined, or at least misconstrued. And anyway, are white and grey hairs predestined or free will? Who’s to say I don’t grow more life in the middle, dare I suggest even the end?

Instead of unwinding into a fleshy pile of bygone, I’m thinking we have it wrong. I’m thinking we upwind into a higher immersion, a bigger scoop to swallow the moments whizzing around, a brighter hollow for holding time-bound happenings.

Stretching joints and lengthening skin are Openings, darlings. When you find a white hair, answer the Opening. Tell your sister. Upwind with the sprouting. These are the apertures for ingesting deep living, and they are for you.

By Lydia Renfro