A new hair color, a new trip

Ri had just bleached her hair.

A small change resting on her head, but sometimes it pulls along a feeling that is very clear: that you are a little different. Not quite that you have become someone else. Only that when walking past a mirror, there is a second when you pause a little longer than you used to.

Lately Ri had been tired.

Work. The office. The same things repeating themselves every day — not big enough to be called an event, but enough to leave a person feeling weighed down from within. There is a kind of tiredness that does not sit in the limbs. It sits in the head. Sitting still, she still thought of what was unfinished. About to rest, she remembered something at the office.

Ri wanted to go somewhere.

In the beginning, that trip was not only Ri’s. There was her boyfriend, too. A plan for two — one that had probably been mentioned, weighed, imagined more than once. Then for some reason, in the end, only Ri went alone.

Where the other person was, the story doesn’t hold onto that part.

But perhaps it does not need to be that clear.

There are trips that were not first set out to be taken alone. It is only that by the end, you pick up your luggage and realize: it turns out being alone is fine, too. Not because you want to prove anything. Not because you do not need anyone. Only that sometimes, a person needs a small space of her own to listen back to herself, after many days of listening to too many other voices.

Ri’s new hair was there, like a small sign.

That she had just done something for herself.

That between the days when work made her taut, between a plan that turned in another direction, between a trip with fewer people than it began with, Ri could still choose to keep a memory in her own way.

Tomorrow, work may still be the same. The office, still the same. The messages will still arrive. The unfinished work will still wait.

But for a very short stretch, Ri had stepped out of the old rhythm.

Alone.

With a new hair color.

And a trip not quite like the one she had planned.

— Ri