Golden Hair

Some people like to think they have golden hair. But those people got nothing on me.

And honestly, I have no idea how it came about, why an ordinary girl should find her bright, brilliant blond hair to be something one step more than that. I’m not even sure exactly how I figured it out. Or was it me? Was it someone else? All I know is that the hair growing out of my head is laced with real gold!

How about that, eh?

My hair is literally a gold mine. Like there’s something I produce in my brain and my hair mines it, and then displays it for the world to see. Though the world doesn’t generally know what it’s seeing. They see a woman with long, richly blond hair, they see the way it shines under lights, or the way it practically blazes under the sun. They happily compliment me, tell me what beautiful hair I have. And maybe some of them see that distinctly metal glint, pause in their thoughts, think: hm. But I hope they don’t. Being the fragile, fleshy epicentre of a gold rush is unlikely to be any fun. I know enough about human nature to know that a girl in that position would probably need a bodyguard. And those are expensive.

Get it? That subtle injection of irony.

I digress.

What matters, what I’m trying to get across, is that I’m the girl with the golden hair.

It might be potentially dangerous being me, but it also has the potential to be lucrative. I was in my mid to late teens when it occurred to me that I could melt a few tufts of my hair down and sell it. It required some privacy, and it required some research on Google, but gold is a soft metal, a forgiving, helpful, kind-hearted metal, and it allowed me to melt it down into a little pot of liquid sunlight.

Then what, though? I tried to imagine how I was going to explain a sixteen-year rocking up to one of those ‘we-buy-and-sell-gold’ places with an unmarked gold nugget. Nothing suspicious about that, right? Nothing to see here, officer.

It was then that I hit upon the idea of jewellery making. And what surprised me was how good I was at it. Like the metal knew I was its mother, like it knew I was part of it, it was willing to be shaped by me into whatever I wanted – little medallions, little animals, flowers, lace-like knots. They were intricate and pretty, and at a couple of fairs and festivals I was able to sell them for a profit. There was just something about the gold, so malleable, so accommodating, and with a special kind of glow about it, something infused with life as well as metal. Something of my lifeforce, my intent or feelings, mixed up in whatever I created.

I made my sister one for her birthday. My sister has a thing about mermaids, so I made her one in the shape of a mermaid. As I finished it, I realised that it actually looked a lot like her, that I had captured some of her essence in my art.

Michelle loved it.

But what matters more than that is that ten days after her birthday she’d been going to take a bus trip to Nelson, but she’d gotten delayed in traffic and missed the bus. She’d been philosophical: that’s life, right? She could catch another bus tomorrow. But then we heard on the news about the bus crash. The one she could have been in. There were three people dead, and I just kept thinking about what seat she might have been sitting in, if it might have been the same one one of those unlucky three had chosen.

Now I’m not saying – not for sure at least – that my hair-gold pendants are magic, or that they’re some sort of a good luck charm. Because there is such a thing as coincidence, or just mundane good fortune, and there’s nothing supernatural about that, it’s the luck of the dice, or the stars, or whatever. It is what is.

But I still made pendants for all the rest of my family, and they wear them. And when I’m over for some family dinner or other, and they’re all sitting around the table with those little bits of my soul hanging around their necks, I can’t help it: it just makes me feel safe.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work