8:54 pm | 10th September 2026
Self Cut Bangs
I decided not to do this but the rain got the better of me. It changed my mind. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror half convincing myself to turn back and go to bed. It’s too late to be making these decisions. Last time you cut your hair you waited months for it to grow back. These are the reminders I give myself. I always have the same counter argument. If I waited so long for them to grow out why do I cut them again when they do? Snip. Snip.
Really what I was, was a dinner table of all the versions of myself. The only thing they had in common was that they were all equally unpredictable and constantly evolving. The only thing I was certain about was uncertainty itself.
I sit down with my self cut bangs that I can feel on my forehead and stare at their vague reflection in my bowl of milk. I pour in cereal. This is my favorite meal. All the versions of me love cereal. I imagine them sitting beside me. Mid-meal one switch places with me. It’s me from about four years ago. Quieter. A fan of self-isolation. In love with the night and navy blue. She snips off my bangs shorter. She lives the next month or so of my life. I don’t interfere. None of my personalities do. When navy blue is in charge, that’s the most at peace I ever feel. Life is slow and my head goes quiet from laziness and sheer boredom.
Nicotine
Months later I’m leaning against a tree trunk situated in the mountains. I’ve been calling myself an ex smoker for years yet I casually light a cigarette in the blaring sun. Something about the view. The crisp backdrop of blue behind fluffy beige clouds. Pine trees competing for the sky, slanted branches, angles, color, texture, sharpness I take it all in with each drag of smoke. I’m polluting this beautiful view. I’m polluting this beautiful view without shame.
In this moment of witnessing the grandiosity of the mountains I developed a new character at the dining table. She loosely pulled the chair out and sat like the too cool for anyone back benchers in high school. She named herself nicotine. The moment she merely took form and pulled out a chair, several other versions of me collapsed. Ceased to exist. They dissolved into thin air. Natural selection.
I disassociated for the entirety of my relapse cigarette. My physical body sat with my back against bark and puffed smoke on autopilot. In my head navy blue and nicotine stared at one another. I didn’t know whether nicotine would overpower navy blue or navy blue would take charge regardless of the whole fiasco.
Nicotine eventually grew bored of looking at navy blue and navy blue stared at nicotine, felt for the first time in her life: envy. She asked, “How do you not feel shame?” Nicotine responded, “About what?”
What navy blue really meant was how did nicotine not feel apologetic. Nicotine shrugged. What they both had in common was that they were tired. Sick and tired of the way things were. Navy blue became paralyzed through it and Nicotine lit itself in a fiery hunger that never went out. She was insatiable, unimpressionable.
Usually my physical body is somewhere and one of the versions of myself decides to jump in and ‘play’ me as if I were a character on a stage. With nicotine at the table something strange happened. For the first time in my life I chose Nicotine to ‘play’ me. I dissolved everyone else of their existence. There was no dinner table. I finished my cigarette, stumped it out on the soil beneath me and never quit cigarettes again.
Blank Canvas
I’m much older now. Despite Nicotine being the only version of myself I chose for myself, I was unaware of the fact that she also had agency of her own. She was the only version of me that’d abandon me. Right after the music stopped playing. At the end of each cigarette. On the walks back home at night. Whenever I doubted her and questioned if she was all that I ever needed, she’d disappear. Much like Nicotine I’d become insatiable. Being unapologetic and without shame was not enough. I never fully understood why a lack of shame was a terrible thing when I had lived my life wrapped inside it. Not until I was Nicotine. I wish she’d felt apologetic at times, felt ashamed at times. Though she seemed marvelous, she was incapable of indulging in all that made her so. It wasn’t for her, her appeal and charm, it was so that others might love her. People did. No one now does. Not even me.
Because I had dissolved everyone I could be, when Nicotine left me I was a blank canvas. I was stripped of all meaning, all characteristics. I used to believe that Nicotine would leave as an act of tough love. Perhaps she found my table of selves odd and being no one could be the only way I would be forced to be the truth of myself. Nicotine was a comfortable, glamorous and empowering truth of myself yet not the complete truth. Neither was navy blue or any of the others.
I don’t eat bowls of cereals or smoke cigarettes anymore, but as I sit by my bedroom window, droplets of rain race each other towards the bottom. I don’t cut my own bangs anymore. I don’t get them cut. I let my hair sprout from my scalp like grass in the soil I once stumped my relapse cigarette in. I am my relapse cigarette and I am my self cut bangs and I am the being that touches neither. I am all I identify with and all I hate to my core yet not even pencil marks show up on my canvas. I like to believe the rain washes it away, but in reality I am formless. I am a static nothingness.
