For later editing...
"So death valley queen,
go marry your king
or an old maid you'll
end up for certain."
Snip. Snip. Feel it fall all around you. It overwhelms. Feel it dragging you down as the weight floats away, til you're on suddenly laying on the ground with your past pooled around you, taking in your surroundings. Your tower of books is everywhere you look, with its pleasant company and familiar voices; there's nothing much to being alone. After all, with these tomes surrounding you, you hardly ever feel the separation between yourself and the rest of the world, truly. Augmenting and decorating the walls of literature, there's pieces of people all around you, pieces that they've given you to remember them by. Books with green covers about language. Books with red covers full of poetry and lessons, drawings from people you've stopped seeing, journals you've never finished, letters you can't throw away, decks of cards you'll probably never touch again. They're relics from a past you felt chained to, mementos of love and an old life you still managed to break ties with.
Find your strength. Stand up and look at the locks you've cut. The strands you've offered as a girdle and a handle and a canvas now lay without purpose, to be swept up and tossed away. Maybe you've offered them up as penance. Maybe it's an exchange and this is the price. An old quote comes back to haunt you... maybe you wouldn't be such a vixen without your hair.
You've torn it out by the roots, you've wrapped it 'round your throat, you've peered through it as a veil between you and the world for so long you're not sure how everything looks without it. You think to yourself, without this falling forward into my eyes, maybe I'll finally see. You think, do I still need to be rescued from myself without the weight of all this history trailing after me, retaining the scents, the shapes it's been forced into?
After all, in the fairy tales, the good and wordy hero climbs her hair to take her away, to save her. She is burdened with his full weight, inch by inch. He climbs up towards his dream of who she must be if he can only save her, up the side of the castle that shames and shapes who she has become, trapping her in ideas that she never wanted to be placed in. She's victimised, yes, but even by her rescuer. Can you imagine that pain? Every tug, every yank, he's a little closer while the tears pool in her eyes and her grip tightens to white knuckle. She has to keep it together. She has to be beautiful and calm once he reaches her. A thousand strokes a day given to that lifeline have taught her the lesson that nobody wants you for who you are. They want the picture created by the efforts they never see, as a band aid for all the pieces of themselves they've let break or die. Your flame to rekindle their ashes and maybe if you're lucky they'll want everything behind the fire, too. After all, how can he say he climbs towards her? He doesn't know her. Perhaps the truth is, he is climbing towards himself. But that isn't as pretty, it doesn't shine and gleam in the sun like her beautiful, beloved, braided hair tumbling down to fate, to love, to what we're told over and over again is the point.
So, the first step, she feels the pressure. The next step she feels the pull. Then each one gets a little harder, a little sharper. But she's strong and her hair's stronger, so she bears it, up and up and up, this one piece of her strength, til the wicked queen comes and cuts her efforts away. Cuts it and uses it against her and her love, blinds him, takes away the poor poor maiden's beauty and casts her out. They call it power. That's how the story goes.
But what if she did it herself? Fought free of her prison? Cut the 'rope' before he made it to the top and called down, Dear Sir, I fear you cannot come this way. I've plenty of strength, you see, but I will not abide the pain this causes, nay, requires. Why flee from one pain to another simply in the hope of relief? Simply in the hope the you'll not lock me away inside your own fantasies instead of here in this place where I can at least see and fight? No, no, my darling, my love, I would happily lay down my life and let down my hair if I could just believe this lightning from heaven was what it seemed. But if you want it thus, you must find another way. This, you see, is my power. This is my choice.
That might have truly been happily ever after, no one blind, saddened or wandering. You know that sort of thing doesn't last but when you look at the alternative, you can see that maybe it is the only path you wish to take.
And so you bear the sound of each click of the shears, knowing full well, this isn't forever. Like the thunderbird in spring it comes roaring back again. Its weight will fall onto your shoulders and you'll peer through it soon enough, maybe at another handsome face asking for all you have to lay down. But until then, you stand and push away the walls around you. Until then you sweep up the pieces, all of them, and you put them away. Not to weave into a shirt to advertise your lament, not to make into something larger than life. Except for maybe one small piece, your little bit of rosemary, for remembrance, you gather it all up and throw it all away.
Because you're not that maiden in that tower, even though every once in a while, you think you could be. And after all. It's only your hair.