And that night when you saw me, you reached your hand up towards me and you said, "You cut your hair.." in this mystified, mysterious voice I couldn't read. And then you sat down in the armchair in my living room and the two of us sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the sunlight stream in through the window and the prisms of glass my mother and I had hung, strung up in front of the window like a reminder of all the clumsy times you break a mirror or a vase. We sat there while the sunlight came through, while it split into dozens of shattered rainbows which threw themselves around the room and onto the couch you were sitting on. Onto the oil painting of a forest by an unknown artist, onto your mouth, onto my hands.

And then you started talking about how you remembered how two summers ago my hair was halfway down my back, and it would get tangled up in my hands. And how when I went swimming, afterwards I would come out and tug, tug, tug at the mess my hair was in, this tangled up mess tinted green with chlorine and yellow with sunshine. And about how after you saw me like that you would go home and write poems about mermaids. You wrote stories where I was the heroine, where I would save sailors from drowning, I would pull them close to me and drag them to the coves of islands where I would give them kisses to wake them up.


"Who were the ones that lured sailors to their deaths?" I said. "Wasn't that the sirens?"

"Yes." You said. You said that I wasn't a siren, because in your mind when you read that, you envisioned these slippery creatures with bronzed skin and black hair like oil spills, hair that they swung like lassos to pull men into their deaths. You said sirens were like the crafty kind of girls who make love to become pregnant so that they can entangle a man and trap him forever. No, you said, no you aren't a siren, you aren't because they come to you willingly.

"They do?" I asked.

"They do." You said.

And it was then that I wanted to see myself as you saw me, I wanted to be one of those greek goddesses, like the ones in the stories. I wanted to have hair down to my feet, I wanted to have my lovers braid it and then get them caught up in it like a true love fishing net, I wanted to wear it like a dress, like a suit of armor, I wanted to wear it like a piece of jewelry that you never leave home without, that you don't even take off to shower, not even if it leaves a cheap green blue ring around your finger from where the copper is rubbing off onto your skin. I wanted to wear my hair like a wedding ring. I think this was the conversation that made me want to climb up the steps of Mount Olympus, not because I thought I was worthy but because you did.