A Thin Observation on Relationships

Here I sit thinking easy thoughts, nothing so diffuse as the end of days or the center of the Universe.  Remembering that it has no center, nor indeed no edge, I know to change gears and get hurriedly back to those easy things, thoughts that barely use a brain cell to form.  And here is one, so I observe:

On what grotesquely thin ground do we form lifelong relationships?  There's nothing thin about the ground of trust, nor respect, nor reverence for the talent one has to live.  But what of a head of hair?  Laugh, as well you may, but think you on this:  the phenomenon of a person's head of hair carries one of the truest weights in how we bond as humans.

Of all the inhumane punishments you can inflict on someone, shaving off their hair is the grossest of all.  Our hair is our living crown, we wear it proudly and guard it jealously.  For a woman, it is the top point of the pyramid of her womanhood; the only woman-part that can be shown.  The others must be kept hidden, but your hair belongs to the world.  Swept up, combed out, brushed and shining, it teases all who see it.  Hair will identify your sex long before anything else does.  It is the bedrock of middle-class upbringing.  Wash it, dry it, brush, shape and comb it, it's your secret power.  Lose your money, your friends, your health, but don't loose your hair.  When shaved or cut off, it will lay on the floor like so many thin umbilical cords which attach us to our society.  Our humanity.  Shorn, they lie in dead, drying heaps, no longer nourished by the body's juices.  The lighthouse of our inner selves, these arrogantly proud strands, suddenly no more than refuse to be swept up.  How helpless we look without our hair.  Helpless and humiliated.  And when we love someone, fully and truly, is there not a swift but sure shock to see them without their hair, so thoroughly stripped of the dignity of their gender?

Hair.  The glowing outer shield that shelters the tiny force within it.  We are all so ... vulnerable.