Braids and the Meaning of Life

As a child, I was in awe of girls with braids. Girls whose hair was set in strictures like Sunday sermons. I saw how hair could be parted in one quick stroke, the sharp bite of the comb moving down the scalp. How their braids lay thick as whips along their back. Even the coarsest hair could be mastered with toothy combs and tubes of gel. But I was a strubbly child. My hair stood out, defiant, headstrong. Uncontainable. I kept trying to learn the art of braiding with my dolly, twisting and turning two clumps of hair around each other―but I could never form a braid until I watched my friend’s mother separate her hair into three equal strands I could follow as they took turns winding over and under each other. So much of life, I found, is composed of three, like the primary states of matter. Even the pole star, it seems, is really three stars in one. Not to mention the three-person God I tried to divine at school. That strange family of men. Is it some stubbornness that makes me need a third proposition to defy life’s Either/Or? A theory like a braid, whose even coils I longed to feel, twining down the center of my back.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.