sometimes my brain is the last to know.

A few years ago, my hair got curly.
Of course, I figured this out over a few weeks because I had never heard such a thing was possible at all, let alone for a grown woman.

The first hint of this evolution happened on the first trip that Jason and I took together. Portland is a completely different climate than Tucson and when my regular haircare routine resulted in the biggest hair I had ever seen, I blamed weather and thought maybe the last time I had highlights that my stylist used some funky chemicals or overdid it. Science, you see? I blamed science for the crazy hair that resulted in a silent, wide-eyed Jason searching for something to say as I pointed at my head and stared back, just as dumbfounded.
I did start to perfect the up-do on that trip...

A few months of bad hair later, I was certain I had been tainted by chemicals, that it just was a stage I had to endure and in a few months it would all be grown out like some super-secret bad perm I had gotten in my sleep.

Then I started working from home.
AKA I stopped grooming like normal humans do before work.

It went like this:
Wait too long to shower, shower between conference calls, sit with wet hair on next call/s, go to restroom later and stare at reflection trying to figure out how there could be curls hanging from my head.

I have this memory of being at the YMCA with my mom when I was (to quote her), "nine going on nineteen" and her saying to some other adult in a voice rife with playful regretlike disappointment, "She has STICK-STRAIGHT hair. I have to perm it or it just hangs there."
I did not want perms. I wanted that stick straight hair, hello do you know who else has stick-straight hair? Barbie and all her super-cool friends. (while we are at it, if you see any childhood photos of me, please assume I didn't want that hair. I did choose the glasses and stupid hats for school photos and certainly could die of embarrassment for THOSE choices-- but I didn't have any say in the short sides or perms.)

Of course, having realized as a grown woman that suddenly, when left to it's own accord, my hair wanted to curl, I was stunned. I still often am.
Did my mother wish-upon-the-world hard enough? Is it some sort of cosmic force? Maybe you don't understand how many times I heard her mention that stick-straight hair as though I had an unfortunate birthmark...

A high school friend told me that hair can curl with aging, just like it can go grey.
If those are my two aging-hair-options well thank you universe, I fully appreciate my good fortune.

Then I read that major life events can change one's hair, i.e. having a baby, menopause, surviving trauma, etc.

The timing of my hair curling is literally exactly when Jason and I began our romantic relationship, as in the timing wherein we both became very aware that there was more than we had previously given credit to going on. We had been undeniably magnetically drawn to each other for a year but never entertained what it meant or that it could be more than a nice friendship.

So maybe it was aging and maybe it is somehow genetic but then it's worth noting that both of my parents seem quite surprised by the curls--not that they're geneticists but I didn't exactly get a "oh that happened to my sister" kind of reaction from anyone. Despite the list of possibilities, I have come to see my curls as my bodies reaction to falling in a kind of love it has never before known, perhaps so frustrated with my brain's reluctance that it decided for me to scream it from the rooftops. My hair had a Tom Cruise on Oprah's couch reaction. My hair came sprouting out, affected by the chemicals (hello science, you are all over my love-blog) and reactions in my brain, unable to just act like everything going on in there was the same as always.

My hair is right. And even my brain knows it.