Hair

Originally posted on Twitter January 10, 2020.

What if you try to pluck a hair but instead of coming out it just keeps going and going and going

.

.

.

and going…

You try to get at it with scissors or a razor but no matter how sharp it is, it just can’t sever it.

You just have to go through life with this weird hair dangling from your elbow.

You go to a doctor to figure out what’s wrong. he shrugs and says it’s not life-threatening and to not worry about it.

You are billed $400.

One day you decide to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. You pull and pull, determined to not stop until the hair is finally gone.

At first it is uncomfortable, but you soon get used to the sensation. Two feet. Three feet. It keeps going. The hair starts to pile up.

You start to wonder if you could get a world record for this. It gets harder to pull, but you keep going. It’s getting thicker too. Thicker than any human hair you’ve seen. Maybe you should go back to the doctor? No, you can’t go out like this… you keep going.

You’re starting to feel tired. Sluggish. But you have to keep going. Your vision blurs. You’re starting to see textures in the hair. Patterns. Faces, even. No… you’re just tired. You keep tugging.

Your vision has gone dark. You think you blacked out or something but… no… it’s the hair. You’re completely surrounded by that hair, that single thin strand completely enveloping you and blocking the rest of your room from view.

You keep pulling but… are you pulling? You feel the hair shifting but—

You can’t feel your hands any more. Or anything, really. Just the fibers scratching against your face. If you even still have a face.

You try to shout, to call for help, but the only sensation you can feel is the rustling of hair. You want to cry, but only feel hair pulling from where your eyelids should be.

That one, single hair that you tried to get rid of has now over you, merged with your existence.

Time passes. You don’t know how long. You try to gain control of your new fibrous existence, but you can’t seem to make any sense of the movements or reactions.

You make peace with the fact that you will never see your friends or family again. That you are consigned to this existence until you expire. Can you even die in this state? When the Sun expires and the Earth is no more, would you just be a mass of hair drifting through space?

You figure you might as well figure out some way to pass the time. At first you try counting, but you can never get to more than around two-thousand before you lose your concentration and have to start again.

You decide to tell a story.

If you squint you can make out shapes in the tendrils surrounding you. They start out simple. A romantic encounter. A comedy of errors. A hero’s journey.

As you become adept at manipulating the fibers, the stories become more complex.

The rise and collapse of an empire. The story of a hundred generations of a family. Entire sagas play out in your mind, realized in the threads that make out your existence.

Before you realize it, the stories start to become interconnected. The fibers weave into each other as the stories feed into each other, spawning new tales. Before long, you have a world. After a while, you have a universe.

The stories seem to create themselves now, but you keep going. Every story that existed, every story that could have existed, every universe that could have ever spawned now exists in this tangle of fibers.

You notice those fibers are thinning.

The thick, detailed textures are starting to give way in your vision, leaving only an even darkness. But you give no heed, and you continue to weave your stories.

As the fibers deplete, as your vision becomes plain, you find it harder to come up with new stories. You persevere, and with every story you weave you notice another strand disappearing from your vision. There are only a few left now.

It takes you eons to track down the last couple of stories. But, eventually, you manage to do it. And as the story plays its ending, you see that final strand disappear from your view, leaving only an empty expanse.

You have no more stories to weave.

You wait for what seems like an eternity. With no more hairs to manipulate, you do not know what to do. You have done nothing but tell stories for so long, you don’t know how to do anything else.

You begin to feel your consciousness fading. Is this what death feels like?

Confident that you have done all that you could possibly do, satisfied with the stories you told, you let oblivion wash over you.

You wake up, once again a human. It appears to be the day after. You look down, and see a hair on your elbow, thicker than the surrounding hairs.

You decide not to pluck it.