Thirty Centimeters of Bun

On Saturday I ran again. Five kilometers around the Alameda, nice and slow, the way Dr. Ruelas said, with my knee keeping quiet the whole way, which is the kindest thing it has said to me in weeks. I got home sweaty and happy, pulled the hair tie out to shower, and my hair dropped halfway down my back, still holding the shape of the bun, like a tired spring. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, where the little Virgin card lives now, and thought, very clearly and with no drama at all: enough.

I've worn the same bun since nursing school. Twelve years, give or take. They wanted our hair up back then and I just never let it down again, not even for weddings. The only thing that changed was the hair ties, which I lose at a rate of three a week and which turn up later in absurd places: on the gearshift, on my nephew's wrist, at the back of my locker, tangled together like worms.

Doña Yoli's salon

I don't have a stylist. I have Doña Yoli, who has been cutting my mom's hair since I was in elementary school and who runs her salon out of her garage, two blocks from the green gate. It's called "Estética Yoli Unisex" and the sign has a pair of scissors painted on it that looks more like a bird. Inside there are two red vinyl chairs, one of those old helmet dryers that nobody uses and nobody dares to throw out, and a small TV in the corner showing the afternoon soap.

I walked in at five thirty without an appointment, my hair still damp. Doña Yoli was doing a dye job on a lady whose head was covered in little foil squares, like an antenna. She saw me and said, "You're Tere's middle one?" I said yes. "The nurse." Yes. "The one who runs." My mother, clearly, tells her everything.

I sat down to wait on a plastic chair next to a rack of magazines from 2018. The foil lady asked what I was getting done. I said I didn't know. She told me that was the most dangerous thing you can say to Yoli.

How much?

When it was my turn, Doña Yoli let my hair down with both hands, lifted it, let it fall, and looked at it the way the mechanic looked at my car battery: with a diagnosis face. "Your ends are fried, mija. And it's the hair tie. Look, there's a mark right here." In the mirror she showed me a crease at the nape of my neck, the exact spot where I've been tying it for twelve years.

"How much do I take off?"

I showed her with my hand, at shoulder height. She moved my hand up two fingers. I moved it down one. We met in the middle, the way my family always does.

She braided it before cutting, tight, like the braid my mom used to give me on Monday mornings before school. Then she picked up a big pair of scissors, the kind that sound like cutting fabric, and took it off in one go. It sounded like a green branch snapping. The foil lady said "ay" on my behalf.

A lighter head

The first thing I felt was my neck. Cold, suddenly, as if someone had opened a window behind me. The second was that my head kept tipping forward, without the bun pulling it back. I hadn't known I'd been carrying a counterweight for twelve years.

Doña Yoli evened it out, put in a little something that smelled like apples and blow-dried it by hand, because the helmet, she said, "is just for decoration." She charged me a hundred and twenty pesos and gave me a new hair tie on the house, "for the hospital, because there you'll still have to tie it up." I put it on my wrist.

I sent a photo to "Las Ortega." Andrea replied, "You look younger." And then: "Are you okay?", which is what my sister asks whenever someone in the family changes something without warning. Lucía sent a picture of herself, with her lopsided haircut, next to mine: "Twins at last." We are not twins. One side of hers is still shorter than the other.

My mom didn't answer in the group. She was waiting for me at the gate. Doña Yoli had called her before I even left, as I found out later. She touched the ends with her fingers, smelled them, and said, "This is how you wore it in kindergarten." I'm not sure it was a compliment.

Sunday night

On shift, Pao walked right past me in the hallway. Three steps later she turned around and said "Ortega?" in the same voice you use to ask a disoriented patient their name. Don Memo, from his booth, raised his thermos and said nothing, which from him is as good as applause.

Now my hair is just long enough for a tiny ponytail, about the size of a paintbrush. At four in the morning, in the dead hour, I caught my hand on the back of my neck, reaching for the bun to tighten it, the way I always did when I was tired. There was nothing there to tighten.

This morning, back from the hospital, I showered in ten minutes and my hair dried on its own on the pillow before I even fell asleep. For the first time in twelve years it didn't smell like the hospital. It still smelled, a little, like apples.