A Hate-Love Relationship
I’m going to be honest with y’all, ergo with myself.
When I first got my locs, I hated them. I wanted to love them, because I loved locs and the professional salon trip was a gift.
But I hated them. I wanted thick, fat, thick dreds and these were not. They were skinny scant coils on my moon-shaped head about half a foot long. I felt like a greasy 100-legged anansi had just crawled up there to bid this world goodbye. I wanted to wash them out but I wanted to keep them and I wanted the gifter to not hate me, so I kept them in. But I hid them.
As the months went along, they started to change. Somewhere in the late summer I stopped putting them under scarves and noticed that they’d fattened up since the beginning. After all of that accidental free-forming, my square parts were a thing of the past, which I don’t mind so much. I started playing with styles for short dreds and promised to take better care of them.
Fast forward to today. It’s almost been a year and to be honest they are lovely. (Especially for the past couple of days! They have been soft and supple which means I’m winning the battle with this dry DC winter.) Quirky things happen, like the amount of hairs that have been escaping to the tune of one large, loose curl in the middle of my head, but it’s cute and endearing.
Sometimes I remember the first night. A friend took me to the place where she gets her four-year-olds freshened up. I asked the lady for thick locs and she raised a questioning eyebrow as if it were far-fetched, so I told her to do what she thought looked best (which I hated, lol remember). We ended up with these really long, thin springs. I now attribute them to about two years of growth of my fine, curly hair combined with her use of a thick wax and rolling my hair into comb coils with the teeth of a rat-tail comb.
If there was one thing I would change, or it I were to cut them and start over, I would do two-strand twists. Sometimes I want to cut them and start over. But others times they are doing just fine and I will wait and see. We’ll see.
