My hair began to fall again. I struggle to say anything else about it, other than I see the yellow threads on my black cardigan, curled on my shoulders. I see them gathered at a shower drain and darkened by water. I see them when I write, a scratch at a woodgrain of my desk. Some, having fallen onto a page instead, come harder to see, unless they cut through a letter.

‘An average woman loses 50 to 100 hair a day’ I tell you. ‘Do you count your hair strands now?’ No, but I might be becoming obsessive. I have been pulling at them, only to know how thin of a rope they tie into. Each time it slips out of my palm, it leaves more threads in my fist. It’s very little to hold onto, yet not thinking about it feels impossible because each fallen thread takes me back to my anxious head.

Dinner with a friend and she pulls a yellow strand from her plate. I wish I felt embarrassed. Feeling embarrassed would be making light of it, blushed and accidental, a single thread fallen, another one picked up with laughter above the table. Instead, dull pain yanks me out of the moment.

Comes hairfall and more than my health, I grieve my gender. Yes, it’s performative, but I love being an actress. Wearing a cotton skirt that reaches mid of my calf. A satin stain of my lipstick making your mouth raspberry and I wipe your lip with my thumb. The way I hold a bouquet and it belongs. The inside of my wrist & my neck carrying perfume of vanilla & pear, and how I tilt my head and make room for your mouth. Bending diary’s spine. Tying a pink shawl over my head. Rising on tiptoes for the shoebox, at the top of the wardrobe, with an old cinema ticket and postcards. More, how we are women to one another: how we notice another’s twisted bra strap or a necklace turned, let me fix this for you. Tying each other’s aprons, braiding our hair and crowns of daisies, how we’re discreet from men.

So much spirit arises when engaging in a ritual.

We’re not wrong for wanting to align with one and choosing gender.

However, the moment the muse is given form, she hinges on the body and exhausts it. Gender has hurt us and it has delighted us. Performing gender feels sincere to me. Sometimes being human makes it impossible. Bodies can be disobedient, grotesque. They break apart, leak and come undone. They get sick. They age. It’s a hot girl summer only until you get a rash and your skin begins to peel off like grape’s skin. You realise that, like any kind of acting, gender subverts the body. Comes hairfall, I don’t look like myself, nor do I feel like myself.

Once my partner said - I don’t get it - why can’t everyone be just people?Why can’t everyone go by they/them? I find the question disarming and sweet, yet my answer always will be rioting I love being a woman. I indulge in maintaining girl’s wonder, sentimentality, whimsy and beauty. However, there are moments when I am just a person and I am not able to maintain my gender in a way that feels in alignment with myself.

—

In a bathroom, walls of terracotta lime-wash and monsteras’ leaves bowed and curled by the sink. A woman wipes her hands while I wash mine, soap stopping at my rings. She lets a tired sigh and The first day is the worst, she says is it the same for you? Eyes meet at a round mirror. I nod sympathetically. Something of memory. I do not bleed. This would be too much to say. Women’s fertility is a metric of belonging. We’re cyclical, tidal and the moon swells and retreats. We bond talking about it, because it’s ours. What if I’m not of a tide but of shore, my only view flat like a photograph, where horizon splits the block of the sea from the block of the sky?

Gender roles have differentiated ways of bringing things forward, whether through conquest and reason or through nurturing, intuition and magic. This simplification and binary have been devastating, of course, but I don’t want to write another essay on how we’ve been hurt and how we suffer consequences of misogyny (although perhaps I should, because there is never enough of those).

Gender is a construct, like a metaphor. Some of its instincts and poetics, like those of fertility and ritual, I find beautiful. Not only are they energies and meanings through which we connect with the world, they also have provided us, for better or worse, a blueprint for making things happen.

Not sex, but gender resonates with fertility. The muse is flirtatious. She romances with the sun, with the fields, with life itself and her knowingness of herbs gives of scents in a mortar. She follows her intuition and brings forward miracles. She becomes Mother Earth. Gaia. Ix Chel. Pachamama. She is the Mother of buds and of damp soil, of berries’ hues, of craft & carrier bags made of bark and dry wheat. She makes things happen, she is an agent of change and of quake, and she floods Earth with a season.

But this too, often is too much for the body.

For some of us, fertility is a pursuit in itself. It means pinching a belly fold and a needle like a silver dash. For some of us, fertility is something we will never embody or embody no longer. I am not fertile & I don’t feel fertile.

In pursuit of my dreams, I drag my body along with my wanting. How can I make anything real for myself, if I fail to embody who I am to myself first? Everything feels less of hope. It is who we want to be and who we are and I’m saddened, because my body gave & I got to know myself too well.

On a good day, I access the female interior world and it feels innate to me. On other days I try to rewrite it into scenes my body is capable of inhabiting. I learn to seek something of fertility elsewhere.

We can write new scenes for ourselves that bring about the same warmth, community and ritual. Scenes that are as potent and as delicious. We can write our own romance that allures life towards us. We make it ornamental, the way gender does. We write scenes that are as conducive to the pursuit of a reality that we want to embody, as gender is. We follow the insatiable pull towards beauty that allows us to sink into the moment.