But in the summer of 2013, I made a terrible, terrible discovery which shook me to the core. If you were to put your finger in the middle of my right eyebrow and travel up my scalp, you would find three grey/gray/greigh hairs growing close together. Please don't actually do that, by the way. I just couldn't be bothered with to come up with a better way to describe how to find the location of those hairs.
I could see my future. A young woman, hair color snatched from her at 23 years of age, still clinging to her dreams of mermaid hair. As she mourns the loss of hair color, she takes comfort in ice cream. As her body adjusts to living off of naught but the nutrients found in ice cream, she realizes that she needs companionship. She invests in cats. Before she knows it, she's an 80 year old woman who spent her entire life unmarried, whose only friends had been cats, and who had still not given up on mermaid hair.
At 23 years 6 months of age
At 25 years of age
At 80 years of age, which is only slightly less terrifying than the following:
Not the girl in the story, but hilarious for some reason
I mean, I'm not saying I have an amazing hair color. It's pretty regular. Just regular brown. Too light to be dark and too dark to be light. I've never dyed it, not even just a little bit. I've always been scared that something would go terribly wrong and all of my hair would fall out I wouldn't keep the color maintained and it would look bad. But when I told my mother of the discovery of my 3 grey/gray/greigh strands of hair, she gave me some advice.
"Carolyn, you can always dye it." And just like that, my terrifyingly sad vision of my future dissipated. I might not have to become an 80 year old mermaid monster after all. If my hair betrays me, I can always trick a man into marrying me through hair dye (haha just kidding) (maybe).
As it currently stands, I have not found any more grey hairs. My hair is still its regular, boring, plain ol' brown, and I'm okay with that. And as time has passed, I have become okay with my 3 grey friends. I have no idea when it is normal to start getting grey hairs, and I'm not in any hurry to add to their number. I would prefer to keep my hair regular, boring, plain ol' brown for as long as possible. But I have accepted those 3 hairs, and haven't even attempted to pull them out in months and months.
Daughters of the Lord, beauty is not truly found in hair color. Finding 3 grey hairs was a surprising struggle for me, and I actually have worried over them. And though I haven't found any more grey (and hopefully will not for a long while), it is just a reminder that what I take for granted in myself as a young woman is fleeting and will one day crumble into dust. Some things will not crumble into dust, however, and it is to these things which we must cling.
