The Lonely Position of Neutral

Long Hair

I'd always loved a woman with long hair, dangling about her shoulders. Sandy blond with black streaks, forced me to swallow a lump in this throat of mine. Call it a fetish, but long hair completes a woman.

She can be um... lacking in other areas, but if she has long hair, she's perfect. I'd never been one to look below a woman's neckline. Where her shirt started and ended is her business. My eyes didn't check out a woman's pants from behind her waist, either.

And then there's Francis; her long hair blew from side-to-side as a breeze would pull her ponytail either way. It'd touch my face as we laid on our backs, staring at the stars in a sleeping bag with our eyes on each one another's eyes and our hands clasped together as if we're going on a flight to a far off distant land with no promise of returning.

Francis joined the army. I begged her not to. But she told me about how she wanted to make the world a better place. But this world isn't shit without her. She took the only thing that made my life better — the friend who comforted me when I'd run out of money and almost pulled the trigger on asking my granddad for more cash.

I'd looked up seeing nothing but her heart-shaped face draped with her long hair. But now she's gone, and I always hear about how unfair life is, and my pastor told me to pray about it (I did). I also sulked in my tears. I'd go back to our favorite places, staring at the stars.

"What the fuck do you want?" I say of the person bumping my sleeping bag.

"What are you doing out here, dude?" a woman asks.

"Get lost, creep!" I say.

The woman laughs. I know that laugh. It's...it's Francis!

"Francis?"

"Who else would it be?"

"I thought you were dead."

"Yeah... Francis Jackson is a common name back east," she says, laughing. "The war is over," she says, undoing her ponytail, shaking her hair to its natural length.

"My life is complete," I say.

(© 2020 by Andrew Cyr)