My dad drops me off in front of a house I’ve never been in before. Levi greets me out front and leads me up the frost bitten driveway and into the backyard where an old, pudgy dog wiggles at our feet.  “How are you feeling?”  “Nervous.” I manage to push out through the squeezing of my throat. They bring me into the back room of their house and pull one of their kitchen barstools up for me to sit on. I carefully wrap the bath towel that they hand me around my shoulders, trying to ignore the mess of myself that my stomach was creating. The same thoughts drum through my head. Is this really what I want? How do I know? What if I hate it? It will take years to grow back. The last time I saw myself with short hair, I was six years old. I did not recognize what about my reflection made me understand that I was the person looking back but I knew that I was there. Now, when I look in the mirror, I’m not sure which parts of the person looking back are supposed to be me. So much has changed since I was six and maybe cutting my hair is not the way to reconnect with that surety in my reflection. Maybe by being here, I was chasing after the wrong thing. But something inside of me is persistent. Something is pushing against my navel, pulling me into making this appointment, into showing up, cash folded up in my hoodie pocket.  Levi’s mom lays her equipment out across the dryer and carefully brushes and braids my hair. She picks up her shears, her hand subconsciously shifting to accommodate their weight, and lifts them to the back of my neck. She stops at the base of my head and asks me if I’m sure. I look at Levi grinning at me in the corner and shift my eyes quickly to the window on the backdoor. This is the last moment I can say no and walk away. I stare at the old white paint peeling off of one of the posts on their pergola. “Yes.”  She gently picks up my braid. The one my mother used to lovingly weave, the one I would ask for when I couldn’t stand the feeling of my knotted hair clinging to the back of my neck any more, the last one I will ever have, and she begins to cut.  I don’t know what I expected it to feel like. I don’t know if I had thought about it at all really, but I am surprised at how much effort it takes. How much I can feel each strand separate from my head when the shears close down, how many times it takes before the braid is cut free. My hair falls down in a curtain across my face, suddenly so much less so than before. Levi laughs. “You look like a soccer mom! Do you wanna see??” I shake my head, knowing that if I saw my hair right then, a short bob curling around my collarbones, I would likely throw up. Their mom lays my braid out on a towel next to her work station. I watch her out of the corner of my eye, hoping to see something that tells me this was the right choice. But my braid just lays there, limp and lifeless; it already looks alien to me. Levi’s mom picks up a spray bottle, combing out what’s left before she gets to work. I sit there, staring at the cold beige tiles, thinking about all the times I had gotten my hair cut before. I had always been glued to my reflection, watching my face for changes with each snip of the blades, trying to piece together the person staring back at me with a paper ribbon tied around their neck and a Supercuts bib around their shoulders. Is that me? It must be me, we’re staring right at each other. Is that really what I look like? I searched my face for signs of myself, confused as to how anyone could look at something as simple as their own face and believe that it somehow contained every fiber of their being. It felt only fitting that I was going through this process blind. It somehow felt wrong to be sitting in a black plastic salon chair, listening to the hairdresser hum along to portugal the man’s feel it still, eyes glued to my reflection. This haircut is not like the others. This haircut is laying in my sleeping bag at Hannah Newman’s 10th birthday party, pretending to be the kind of kids that giggled in their sleep. It is sitting on the back porch in still wet bathing suits, shivering under faded beach towels, eating strawberries covered in Reddi whip. It is standing on the view deck of the Rockefeller Center in New York City, as the ground stretches nauseatingly downwards to the yellow taxi cabs the size of the novelty ones in the gift shop. It is silently kissing Levi for the first time in the dark of their room when we are supposed to be in separate beds.  When she finishes, Levi’s mom lifts up a hand mirror. I stare back at the fragment of my face, the mirror too small to encapsulate it all. I see my hair sweeping down across my forehead and swallow down the tide of anxiety bubbling up in my throat. I promise myself to not panic until I see it with the rest of my body. I force out a smile and a thank you, stuffing the cash from my pocket into her hands. I text my dad that I’m done and help Levi put away the bar stool and sweep up the fibers of my hair coating the floor. We sit in their living room, Levi’s step dad watching the Packers game. They speak in a mix of Spanish and English, I can never tell when they switch, everything sounds foreign to me. He tells Levi I look like Eminem and their family quickly adopts that as my nickname. My cheeks burn with a new kind of feeling, something I wouldn’t know how to put into words until months later. When my dad picks me up, I cover my hair with my hoodie, feeling the fabric of my hood rub against my neck for the first time. When he asks me to see it, I tell him not yet, that I have to see it in my bathroom mirror first. I can’t bear the thought of his eyes on my head when it feels so fragile, as if a single glance could shatter what’s left of my hair. We ride in silence the rest of the way home, but my mind races, every street catching fire as we cross it. Over the next few days, I stare at myself endlessly in the mirror. Trying to reconstruct the familiar with the new. My hand subconsciously grabs where my hair used to be. Pulling the phantom strands out from under my shirt, shifting them away from my neck when my head hits the pillow, unsticking them from my back in the shower.  Slowly, I rebuild my face in the mirror. The braces put on two summers ago, the scar on my cheek from a middle school friend I don’t talk to anymore, the mole at the corner of my lips that stains every baby picture. When I finally stitch the pieces back together, when my hand stops cradling my hair’s ghost at night, when the feeling of my shirt against my skin fades away, I look in the mirror again. And this time, the person that looks back is me.