#103, Hair: Baby's first boy haircut
Originally posted here on February 8, 2023.
Did/does your fictomere have hair? Natural or dyed? Styled or loose? Do you have emotional or cultural ties relating to your hair?Ha, yes, I would say that my hair was rather important to me back in-source, and to a lesser extent here. Long before I renamed myself Goratrix, before I knew I was a Mage, and centuries before I became a vampire, I was born a peasant woman in a village in what is now France in 840 CE. Women in my village wore their hair long: it was what was done. Men
could have long hair--and certainly elsewhere in the world, they often did!--but
only men could have short hair where I grew up. For a long time, I coveted that, and did not know why.
It was only after I realized my powers as a Mage that I found that, perhaps... I liked my reflection best when I pulled my hair back, because I could try to pretend to be a man that way. The longing struck me hard--I wanted to be a man. What a nightmare in the ninth century! Thankfully, when Tremere recruited me, he made it immediately clear that entering the Order of Hermes was a chance to reinvent myself. Mages could make themselves look however they wanted, given enough power and practice, and he told me that I could change my name, my appearance, my sex, anything.
Anything.
That very evening, I cut my hair short with Tremere's knife and declared myself the man now known as Goratrix. It looked awful--lopsided, ragged, with no sense of aesthetics or anything other than desperation of presentation. I looked terrible. I wore my hair short for years after that, stubbornly cutting it myself for the first few (thankfully no haircut was as bad as the first!) before eventually ceding to Meerlinda's ministrations. I looked less lopsided that way. Eventually, though, I became displeased with it, and could not figure out why. For years it plagued me as I looked at my reflection--did I not want this? Had I been wrong about something so vital? But, no--I could not imagine wanting to let go of being perceived and referred to as a man.
Eventually, I realized that I just didn't like having short hair. The realization took me by surprise and I laughed and laughed about it. I had cut it short as a mark of change, as a desperate declaration of I am a man, please God see me that way, but I didn't need that anymore. People knew who I was. I grew it out and never looked back, especially once I enacted other physical changes upon myself that represented my gender in a way I liked. I love having long hair--I think it frames me nicely, it's dramatic, and I love to spend time working with it. It's some of my "calming down" time. Once I became a vampire, that mattered less, since it always fixed itself over the daysleep, and it became more dry and dead over the centuries... but, still, I am glad that it was long when I was Embraced, or I would have bitched about it forever.
Nowadays, I have my long hair in headspace, but the body has extremely short hair, only a few inches long--and that's too long for the host, Tanix. I have begrudgingly accepted that I may never physically have long hair again--but it doesn't bother me overmuch. I don't primary-front often, and headspace is more than enough for me when the alternative is to make Tanix uncomfortable.