Where did you go (my lovely)?

If I were a Peanuts character, I would undoubtedly be Frieda. It's not because I'm a “chatter box” or play baseball or because I get thirty valentines each year. None of these things are true of me. But I do have naturally curly hair, or at least I used to.

Normally, the mop of brown hair on my head, varying from shoulder to shoulder blade length, is composed of tight, corkscrew curls. My friends (and even people I don't know that well) take great joy in “boinging” my curls. I, too, from time to time, have enjoyed stretching them out to their full length before letting go and watching them spring back to their length somewhere between my shoulder and shoulder blade.

Every now and then, I like to straighten it, just for the heck of it. This will usually happen in the winter when there's less of a chance of humidity ruining the hour and a half of work that goes into straightening my hair. In general, it freaks people out when they see me with straight hair and they're not expecting it. My favorite reaction to my non-curly hair happened earlier this week when a friend of mine, after greeting hello contorted her face in confusion before uttering, disgusted, “What the hell?” As she explained, the space around my face didn't match.

Normally, once my hair gets wet, any suggestion of straightness disappears and my hair reverts to its natural state. This time, however, my curls haven't returned. This past week I used a new flat iron that I had never used before. I washed my hair a day later and it stayed straight. I've been washing my hair for the past four days and still nothing. I'm starting to get anxious. Where have my curls gone? I want them back.

Like many latin women, my hair has always been a contentious issue; it manages to encompass all issues of race and gender dynamics within our culture. I hated my hair as a child. Neither I nor my parents quite knew how to manage it as it was an odd combination of my mother's thick wavy hair and my father's fine straight hair. Many a weekend was dedicated to hot blow dryers and giant painful rollers like so many others of my ilk. My grandmother always said I looked “greñado”, i.e. “a complete mess” in puertorrican. Only once I was in the final stages of high school did I really figure out how to manage it and realize that I actually loved it. It's become a huge part of my look, my image, my ideology of self. And it's gone. Well, on vacation. I hope. Right now it feels like I'm wearing someone else's hair on my head, like there's some random guest staying with me and I'm waiting for the usual tenant to come back.

Wherever you are, if you can hear me, Curls, come back to me.