I’m fomenting suburban rebellion starting with my hair. It began last May with a Brazilian straightening that crackled into brunette milli-shards, then the cut, careful with a razor to save what could be saved from atop my tentacular Medusa’s head. And so it was, a kind of a punk do, a disarray only undone by pillows. Each morning, the back was fallen, then resuscitated. Hopeful fingers and elixirs coaxing the tortoise from its shell. This must be what that hermit crab felt like in 1988, when my dad, wanting to verify what the boardwalk sales-kid described as a sick E.T. transitioning from a tight shell to a roomier one, took pliers from the garage and splintered, then cracked it— as though it were nothing more than nutmeat to be turned over in our hands. Let’s see, he said. It has to come out now. And it did. And it looked like E.T., hypothermic, translucent, when it scooted forward once and died. A diminutive Mercutio—a plague, a plague, he might’ve eked out if he’d not been voiceless, boxed within glass in my suburban bedroom. It’s tough to say what the plague is, in the case of my hair. Is it my vanity—that drove me to straighten already straight hair? Is it incompetence in the fuschia-mohawked stylist who backcombed what should’ve been left slack? Or maybe it’s this house, this life, so lucky that leads me to create difficulty for myself, to tiptoe onto the cold garage slab at night, sweeping spiderwebs and WD-40 aside, looking for tools to crack it open.

Go ahead and lay your thumb across your forehead. Can you feel the calm? Like a cool compress for the afflicted? How far away we’ve gotten from the beginning— when the vial thrums next to the needle on that square, steel tray, humming for the coming alchemy, it’s the Big Bang in the doctor’s office, lightning and bacteria in a bottle, cc’s of creation piercing the skin, planets colliding, ether parting, and the bands swaddling the Cosmos together relax and soften. Sigh—can you feel it? See the world where it started. Liquidy and hot, temperate, tropical, a Paleolithic sauna; it’s tough to be angry when it’s so comfortable. And that’s how the fighting would stop, justice return to water. 90% water at birth, they say, and you’ve acknowledged it, letting the primordial pools swell, collecting what’s poison and plenty swirling behind your countenance. I am a woman underwater so let me be buffeted by its peace, its ruinous tides, its indecorous currents. Take my hands and let them do the work—but my face— veil my eyes with moss-cold laurel. Grant me medically assisted paralysis. There is a return, a womb that will carry us again: Clostridium botulinum. So walk in vanity because it’s not vanity at all, not in the way it sounds, but in the way that it looks— like truth restored, like Eve when she was just Eve—no apple, no snake, no man, no kids, no minivan. Go ahead, don’t let them make you feel bad about it. You are water and toxin, balm and danger, modern and very, very old.