A boy is 18, adult. He is not small and vulnerable anymore. He doesn’t look like other people. He starts to enjoy the fact that he is not ordinary. All his life he wanted and tried to blend in. Something changed. He thinks he is pretty. People started liking him.

One day after university, he and his girlfriend were walking towards the café. It was 4-5 pm. It was October. The sun was shining and the wind was blowing. While crossing the street (the wind is always stronger on the crossroads) the wind blew harder and messed up his hair right and left, up and down. It started moving. The hair was not too long, just 6 cm. He started laughing. He was amazed and happy of the fact that wind could actually mess the hair. He started talking about it to his friends. It lasted 15 minutes, the joy. They didn’t get what he was so excited about. They were girls, they always had long hair.

All his childhood, he had to have his hair shaved. His mother didn’t like long hair on boys. His mother didn’t like ginger hair. So she thought if the hair is shaved very often, it will get darker. Almost every week he was at the hairdresser. It was kind of a curse loop. Over and over again out of a blur, his mother would start monitoring the hair, how long it was and that it was time for shaving. It was getting harder and harder to convince him to do so, so she had to invent new excuses and reasons. She started blackmailing him, saying she won’t walk with him on the street because it was embarrassing. Afterwards they purchased a shaving machine and they were doing it at home, in the bathroom.

He always wished to have curls but his mother was always saying that it’s impossible, that he has wavy hair and it’s not cut as curls. When he grew his hair, it started to become curly. Only after that she told him that, actually, when he was born he had ginger curls and she cut them off.

She tried to control everything she could to make him more masculine, as she always sensed that he was gay. She didn’t know that she cannot change that. Nobody taught her that. She controlled how often he was looking in the mirror, how much he should use his hands while talking, how he should walk, how to stand. He liked to bake, but she was saying men shouldn’t bake, men should cook meat, but he wanted sweet cake with cherry.

His body wasn’t his. His body was his mother’s.

Even now, the boy as an adult, 27 years old, although he doesn’t live with his mother anymore, from time to time she stills remarks on the length of his hair, but she doesn’t have that power anymore. She raised a very strong individual.