My Life So Far in Rapunzel’s Tower

The Cabot Science Library draws a specific sort of madness out of me. The sterile lighting that blurs the difference between day and night, the memories of freshman fall all-nighters and Ec 10a problem sets, the peculiar smell of late adolescent stress and excitement mixing in one big room. It’s a lot.

Sometime during finals period last spring, I attempted to write a paper for English 110. Sitting on the second floor of Cabot, I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration, glancing at the four empty bottles of Pure Leaf lemon tea sitting in my backpack. No words were landing on the page — I’d been staring at the same sentence for over half an hour.

I don’t know how to explain what happened next, if I’m being honest. I think I just wanted to do something impulsive, get away from the finals week funk, maybe shock myself out of writer’s block and finally finish this goddamn paper. I walked out of the Science Center, straight to Andre Hair Salon situated across from the Dome (the Inn, as it was called back then) and asked them to cut six inches off of my hair.

The regret was immediate. (Although, I did end up finishing that paper.)

I didn’t like my new haircut from the start, but it took me about a month to actually act on this malaise. As my life soundlessly settled into summer, I set out with a goal that I’m sure many others can relate to: I was going to completely change my life. I’m talking three-mile runs every morning, a book every week, a surplus of plans with hometown friends, a successful 9-to-5, and of course, hair oils every night before bed. I was going to return to Harvard revived, ready for the year ahead, with a luscious, long, and beautiful head of hair.

***

In “The Unconscious Significance of Hair,” psychoanalyst Charles Berg identifies hair removal as a feature of mourning for the Trobriand Islanders. But removing your hair as part of mourning is not limited to the Papua New Guinea archipelago — without realizing it, I had mourned a death in advance — one that would overshadow much of the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college.

When I came home from work on a Monday to my mom sitting in the living room, staring blankly at a spot on the floor, her cousin’s voice flowing miserably from her phone where it lay beside her, my heart sunk. I dropped everything, joined her on the couch, held her hand, and waited. The silence stretched between her quiet sniffles. A few minutes passed, another voice message came: Maqui was gone.

The funeral would be scheduled for the following week, but my family and I would not be in attendance.

The thing about escaping one’s home country with little hope of return is that you split your life in two distinct halves: one is the physical reality, where events are tangible and therefore manageable, where life is objectively easier, and a future looms ahead of you. The other half, too, goes on, but through a fog; you are constantly floating above it, aware that your feet cannot touch the ground once again, robbing you of the ability to assess reality at full force.

It’s like watching your life in the form of a weekly reality TV special: you’re invested, you’re kept up, but a sense of fiction clouds your vision.

My aunt Maqui, whom we had left behind in Venezuela, who had brightened my family’s life with her endlessly youthful energy, who had encouraged and cultivated my love for music and art and all things human, who had helped raise my mother, and later me, had been on her deathbed for weeks. She had danced her last dance and sang her last song, but it would take a long time for that truth to really seep into my bones. For now, all I could do was hug my crying mother, live out the rest of the summer, and keep floating.

I do think that my silly routines, while a complete failure at total reinvention, kept me from completely falling apart. Still, as it happens, my grief manifested in arbitrary ways. The next time I cried this summer, for example, is ridiculously embarrassing.

***

On August 8, I received my sophomore housing assignment: a small double on the fifth floor of the Kirkland annex. No elevator. I became so visibly upset that my boss suggested I leave work early. I walked out of the Massachusetts State House and made it about 200 feet before I collapsed by a tree in Boston Common, curled up in my work pants and suit jacket, and cried for two hours.

I immediately started referring to my dorm room as the Rapunzel Tower. I continue to do this today. Naturally, this only fueled my desire to grow my hair out. It wasn’t just for personal reasons now: I had to do this for the bit.

My time in Rapunzel’s Tower so far has taught me this: Harvard is four years of constant rollercoasters, which allow little time for drastic and successful reinvention. Anything can blindside you at any moment, and it’s okay to “lose” a month of your life to process the unexpected. It’s okay to spend a summer at home and return to school completely unprepared for a rigorous semester. You cannot always expect to be in control of your life. Sometimes, you are at the world’s mercy.

A few days before Dia de los Muertos this year, which I had never before celebrated, I placed a photo of Maqui on Kirkland’s ofrenda. I must have done so too early, because for several days she was the only photo there — I checked, many times.

This crushed me. I hated the idea of her being alone, just as she’d been in the days before her passing, while in life she’d always been surrounded by people that loved her. But unlike Rapunzel, my tower is neither hidden nor solitary. By November 1, Maqui was surrounded by smiling faces. And, as I came to realize staring at her picture on the ofrenda, so am I.

I’m displeased to announce that climbing up five flights of stairs to my dorm room has not gotten any easier. I am pleased to confirm, however, that my knee-high boots that I bought in late August no longer fit around my calves, and my hair now falls slightly below my shoulders. Change occurred, one way or another.

I don’t know what I was trying to cut out of myself that fated day last spring, and I don’t know what I was trying to replace it with this summer. I’ve decided that, for the time being, I’m done trying to carve myself into a perfectly-controlled sculpture. For now, my plan is to keep climbing through the days, step by step, and to pause for breath at each floor as needed. I’m going to keep living life through whatever it may throw at me, and trust that the day will soon arrive when I can honor my new home’s namesake and let down my hair.