When I was younger, I was shy and would let my hair grow out to about my shoulders so that I could cover part of my face with it. Call it what you will, but it always felt like a physical barrier between me and the outside world, however inconsequential it may have been. I caught all sorts of flak for it. My parents would incessantly pester me about cutting it; others in school would make fun of me for looking like a girl and sometimes bigger kids would pull it. As I grew older and joined an anarchist rock band, the problems with my hair grew into positives and with that, I grew a little more outgoing. Girls loved it and I have to admit, it did look way cooler when I head banged. After school, and well after I'd left the garage band, I got a job in retail and worked my way into management. All this time I kept my long hair until it became unmanageable and I was forced to use a hair tie to wrangle it into a neat ponytail. It reached my waist.

Time went on.

I remained single and lived a relatively solitary lifestyle beyond my work and online gaming. I'm not sure what it was, really. I don't know what made me keep my hair. Maybe it was to serve as a reminder to my young rocker days or maybe it felt nice to have people comment on its shine. I liked it. I liked brushing it before work. I liked surprising people when I let it down and shook it around.

But the other night I had a terrible nightmare where I was at the dentist. The dentist stood over me as I lay confined to his chair. He was looking down at me, shaking his head. "Tsk tsk tsk. No good." He said. I was confused and wanted to run from his office, but when I looked down to the restraints on my arms, I saw I was pinned to the arm rests by giant bolts pushed through my forearms. This made me struggle more. The dentist hardly seemed to notice my shaking howls. He went over to one of his cabinets and withdrew a big green bib, coming back over to gently place it underneath my chin. "All better. Yes?" he asked while grinning. His teeth were iron prosthetics.

He pulled at some device above my head, swiveling it around until it was positioned right in front of me. It was a hose, and he began feeding it into my mouth and down my throat until I could feel it in my stomach. He flipped a switch somewhere on the device and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I heard a whirring from somewhere behind me. He was sucking the air right out of my body. I could feel my lungs deflating as I gasped and struggled. Just as my vision began to blur, I awoke.

I shot up in bed and looked around. As the familiar setting of my bedroom's shadows quelled my anxiety, I noticed that there was something in my mouth. I pulled at the thing and felt something come up with it, straight from the center of my chest. I choked and gagged, reaching for the light on my bedside table. Flipping it on, I looked down at the thing hanging from my lips in awe. It was my own hair. I positioned myself on the edge of my bed and mentally prepared for what I was about to do. I grabbed the hair with both hands and tugged it hard until the thing attached to the other end stopped somewhere in the back of my throat. I strained but was forced to stop when it felt like the thing would rip out my esophagus. The thing anchoring my own hair inside of me was simply too big and I let go of it, feeling it slide back down my throat until it rested somewhere in my chest again.

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I went to the bathroom and flipped on the light, inspecting myself in the mirror. I looked pretty foolish with the ends of my hair stuffed into my mouth. Without even thinking, I reached for the scissors I kept for trimming split ends and sliced through the mass of hair easily enough. I sat the scissors down on the bathroom counter and attempted to steel myself against this predicament with long, deliberate breathes. The hair must've started a tickle because without meaning to be, I was caught up in a bout of coughing and hacking and dry heaving. With a long-panicked gasp, the newly cut ends of my hair shot down my throat and disappeared. I felt the thing they were clinging to slide down into the pit of my stomach.

I felt sick and tried to throw up into the toilet, but nothing came. I tried convincing myself that it was just a hallucination or bad dream and nothing more, but every time I did I felt it slosh around in my gut or examined that the hair from the top of my head was barely past my shoulders. This served as evidence that I had indeed cut it. I called out of work and moved through my house like I had the flu. I made myself some breakfast but ended up throwing it out. The thought of putting something on my stomach made me nauseous.

I went back to the bathroom and could've sworn that my hair had grown past my shoulder blades. This startled me but I figured I must not have accurately assessed where my hair was last.

The next day my hair dragged along the floor and every step through my apartment felt like I was tearing through hair fibers. Allow me to explain. It felt like it was inside of my muscles and that every movement I made forced the hair inside of my body to snap so that every step I took was accompanied by almost inaudible pops similar to the sound you might hear if you pluck a hair out of your head.

The day after that, I wasn't even sure that my eyes had opened after waking, but that was simply because it had begun to grow from the corners of my eyes and hang down over my cheeks. Plucking the stringy wet hair from around my eyes was arduous due to the fact that every time I got a good grip on a hair to tug it out, I felt a shiver down my spine like metal. I'm no doctor, but I think the hair on my head is now growing inwardly, into my skull, and through my brain. It's growing into my body. That doesn't sound so bad, right? Well it's growing out from underneath my fingernails until they die and fall away. My toenails are all gone, I think. I have at least one nail left on my right hand, but it's hard to see through all of this hair.

I'm sorry. I have to go. With every breath, I can hear that same popping sound from before. It will only be a matter of time until it constricts my breathing altogether, but I have a plan.

I'll be using gasoline.

If there's one thing I've learned having lived years with long hair, is that it hates excessive heat.

Wish me luck.