Regret vs Faith

             

REGRET VS FAITH

by

Anthonystjoseph

     I have been going through a big transformation lately which has been mired in struggle and regret.  I am deeply troubled at the current time because of a huge sense of loss and regret.  A few months ago I got a wild bug up my ass in New Stanton, Pennsylvania and decided to cut all of my hair off for a change.  Immediately after taking a pair of sewing scissors and cutting my hair off in a hotel room I felt no regret.  I was comforted in the fact that I took such a momentous step of relieving myself of something I had cherished and coveted for so long.  Eventually, we all must say goodbye to everything.  It wasn’t until I woke up at three am in the morning and walked to the bathroom and saw myself in the mirror that I felt the first sense of loss, and a tremendous sense of loss it was.  I had immediately lost ten years of life and my youth.  Delilah herself had guided my scissors and thoughts and stolen my powers of holding off the inevitable friend and foe called time.

     As I saw myself in the mirror I realized in a quick and great sense of horror that I had aged ten years.  It was as if I was looking at my uncle himself for I looked exactly like my uncle with all the lines of age on my face clearly present.  I immediately realized that my hair that was four feet long in its twenty years of growth had been holding my face back in its ponytail and preventing the lines of wisdom and age from showing.  My hair and its weight had been providing a natural face lift that was now gone.  I had always wondered why I wasn’t aging as my fellow high school classmates.  When I looked at their photos on social media I felt as though they looked like my parents instead of my classmates.  Now in the second that I had looked in the hotel bathroom mirror at three o’clock in the morning I had joined them.  I immediately felt an extreme sense of loss and started to panic.  My youth had been stolen by my own idiotic hair stealing hands.  There was no turning back.  All these thoughts came in a few seconds as I walked closer and closer to the mirror hoping I was wrong and my vision was off.  No, I had clearly aged ten years as I slept.  My youthful face which was clear of any lines of age and time was gone.  As I took two more steps towards the hotel mirror I walked right past it and went into the inner bathroom and urinated and let the urine and the loss I felt leave my body at the same time.  There was nothing I could do to change back time as any scholar or living being would tell you was impossible.  I laughed it off and went to bed forbidding myself to let regret take hold.  For I knew that when I took the scissors in hand to take away the four foot long mane of hair that had caused many to admire and comment away that if I ever let regret in it would take me to my knees in loss.  I went back to bed and decided I would just find a heavy moisturizer and hope for the best.

     Now, a few months later, the regret is trying to grab hold with an iron fist that Samson himself would yield before Delilah got ahold of his mane of hair.  I am now allowed to walk in public without anyone noticing me or any of the many admirers that would be complete strangers walking up to me and declaring their admiration of my hair.  Little old ladies and young girls alike would ask to feel it and touch it on a daily basis.  Occasionally I would even have to defend and state that it was all my own hair that I had grown naturally.  Now I walk past people in a store and no one cares to even look in my direction.  My natural form of celebrity disguised as a four foot long mane of hair is gone.  Visually, I am now a commoner, a peasant. 

     By the way, someone did happen to stare at me in the store the other day like the days gone past and seem to not be able to take their eyes off me.  I basked in the feeling of being admired again.  I guess it was the clear marks of obvious wisdom that my new age lines revealed.  Or maybe it was as the lovely clerk in Sally’s Beauty Supply said, as I bought new hair products for my new afro, “You’re still attractive”.  As she said the words I slightly mocked regret with a look of terror on my face and replied to her encouragement at my obvious sense of loss, “You think so!?!”

     As the sense of regret tries to take hold on a daily and sometimes hourly basis I continually fight it off with my sense of faith and hoping that everything happens for a reason.  I go back and forth from what I want to do to with my new loss of hair length and celebrity and waiver in new hair styles and trends but I know it really doesn’t matter because God knows my hair is not me.  I needed to concentrate on other endeavors as well so ces la vie.  With my new afro which is growing as fast as my dreadlocks did, I tell myself that I traded my mane of hair for a crown of hair.  I must have faith that I am still me and truth be told, thinking clearly, that doesn’t even require faith, I am still me.

By

Anthonystjoseph

All works copyrighted  and protected by law