“Moot point. And it’s agoraphobia. And I don’t,” I say, brushing her off me.

“Like fuck. I mean Atha-za-gora-goddamnfuckin’-pobia. It’s a fear of forgetting shit, and a fear of being forgotten. Or ignored. Being a regular old nobody. That’s why you’re obsessed with remembering everything. That’s why you are writing your life down. And that is why you are secretly happy as a pig in shit that everybody is flapping their gums about the fact that you’re home and you’re sick. You are also a chicken. So you’re right, nothing has changed.”

“How am I a chicken?” I say, equally insulted by her insinuation as I am by the emptiness and overall mediocrity of my bottle of wine.

“Because you don’t have the balls to drag Gimp out into the woods for a good ol’ boot knockin’ the way you used to. And you won’t write a life story that really bleeds truth from your little gold veins if all you do is remember stuff and wait to die, without actually looking for more. And you won’t shave your head unless somebody pushes ya. You’re a chicken. You balk at everything.”

She chicken walks around the firepit, going “Bawk! Bawk! Bawk!” for a minute or two, staring a hole through me with her mad, wide, sparkling, swamp-green eyes and sneering at me with her devilish grin before resuming her serpentine trance dance.

“Pass me that joint, go get the clippers and some scissors, and crank up the fuckin’ Zepplin,” I say.

Beneath a waxing moon, around a roaring fire, and under the influence of snaky chicken dances, wine, weed, and canonized rock riffs older than the hills, we dance and spin and play air guitar — Char dressed like a pop art Zulu priestess and me in a black yoga uniform that has never seen the upside of a downward dog, with a big frizzy ponytail thrashing around on the top of my head. It feels cultish or paganish. Probably looks like two messed up, middle-aged broads out in the woods pretending they have nothing to lose, while occasionally pausing to listen for crying through a crackly old baby monitor.

I hold scissors in one hand, thick cord of my hair in the other. I close my eyes as my chest fills with a strange sensation, a mixture of extreme detachment and profound presence. I am not thinking about the future consequences of being bald. I am not thinking about vanities past. All of that evaporates.

“Fuck it,” I say, as I squeeze the scissor handles together and push the blades through the stubborn strands. Seconds later, I am holding my long, chocolate-brown-with-caramel-highlights ponytail in front of me. Two hundred and seventy-six bucks worth of salon colouring, right there. I toss it onto the fire, which unleashes the unmistakable stench of burning hair into the night and ruins the whole sacred ritual vibe I’d been riding.

Char flips the clippers to life. Her soft hands and the hard appliance caress my head. I feel the steady vibrations of every pass all the way through my skull and into my chest. This is not what I thought it would feel like. Moments later, my hands quiver as they travel over the unfamiliar terrain of my freshly liberated skull.