Page 12 of Slanting Towards the Sea

ELEVEN

THE NIGHT BEFORE I leave for the Olive Oil Manifestation, I take a long bath and wax my legs.

As I put on a sheet mask, I stroke the few gray hairs silvering in my chestnut-brown hair and touch the few lines that don’t fully go away when I stop smiling.

I don’t mind these small tokens of growing older.

They give a sense that there’s some life behind me.

Enough smiles to etch themselves onto my face. Enough worries to streak my hair.

But as I’m grooming, I see it. A single gray hair, down there. I stare at it, hot-and-cold sweat climbing up my spine while my brain ping-pongs, confused, because what does it matter that I have a gray hair down there, when I have them up here where anyone can see?

And I cannot explain it, cannot rationalize it, my body is acting of its own accord. I’m suddenly freezing in a bathroom filled with hot mist, and everything feels blurry, like it isn’t real, like this is another person’s life, not mine.

I realize, with a start, that life has scurried past me.

In all my musings about getting older, I never thought about pubic hair.

It never occurred to me that it too would go gray.

That it too would grow old. That this most private part of me that no one ever sees but me—because there is no one, there was never anyone before or after Vlaho—will be the place I mourn my youth the most.

As I’m standing there bending over myself, I feel, very distinctly, something inside me snap. I can literally hear the sound of it, something essential inside that I don’t have the words for, snapping.

I fight the feeling off, splash my burning face with cold water. I open the bathroom door to let the steam out, to let that feeling out, but it doesn’t go. Instead, as I climb into bed, it climbs in after me and sits on my lungs when I turn the lights off.