Written by Zach Siddiqui, Humour Editor

To misquote Veronica Sawyer of Heathers fame, my quarantine hair-angst bullshit has a body count.

I mean, I wouldn’t say I feel crazy guilty. Obviously I didn’t want any of my suitors to die. Like, that wasn’t the goal, as such. But can you blame me? Everyone’s always all, ‘Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!’ Excuse me . . .  I’m the one who’s been let down. My boyfriends are all goddamn himbos.

I try to give these boys the benefit of the doubt, I do. But it’s hard to feel respected when he tries to use your hair as jump-rope to get his cardio in, now that the gyms are closed. Once I had dinner with a guy who asked which muscle group I was named after.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Like any good fairy tale, let’s start at the beginning. Once upon a time, amid a global pandemic, Rapunzel discovered the haircut.

I knew what a haircut was, but I didn’t know the power it apparently had, not until I finally saved up enough for an iPhone. Just look on Twitter. “Closure isn’t real just cut your hair and pretend it didn’t happen,” Tweets tony cock. What do you mean, I can just chop it all off and rewrite my personal history? I guess I’ve missed a lot off the grid. 

The real inspiration came when I read about COVID-19. (Thank goodness Mom prepared me for this one.) I saw and read about all these people who cut their hair to escape their boredom, to try something new, to make up for being unable to outsource their labour to a hairdresser for once. It was inspiring. It was maddening. 

When those harrowed, underpaid Rogers techs set up my new unlimited data plan, they opened my eyes. Here were all these plague-ridden freaks online, panicking and scalping themselves under the guise of “experimenting,” and what was I doing? Hacking up hairballs every morning, that’s what.

Well, no more, I thought. I was the ORIGINAL quarantine girl. If anyone was going to enjoy release from the fettering ravages of their own identity, it was going to be me. 

I remember leaning my head back through the window. I wanted the symbolism of letting that sucker fall through 70 feet of air. I stayed like that for a while, feeling the wind. My hair almost seemed to be getting heavier the more I waited. Perhaps it was time to just get it over with. I raised the Wahl clippers and sliced.

Shaving my head felt like so much weight dropping from my shoulders. All my fears, my anxieties . . . it wasn’t until I heard the desperate screams that I realized who that last 180 pounds belonged to.

Poor Flynn, but honestly, he should have listened when I told him that visiting his girlfriend mid-pandemic still counted as a distancing violation.

My summer chop didn’t last too long, sadly. My hair lengthens after being cut short almost as suddenly as Vladimir Putin’s term in office does. There are benefits to being the adoptive daughter of a jealous and homicidal witch, I guess. I might actually like her, if she wasn’t also the worst landlord in history. 

Well, I guess I’ll be taking this chance to try a few different cuts. I’ve run through bangs or no bangs, different layers, side shaves. A few more men have plummeted to their deaths for sure, but luckily I have yet to take down the DoorDash deliverer. And if Gothel wants my rent this month, I guess she can try and climb her own way up for once.