Buzzcut
My hair is coming in faster now. Or I’d never noticed how fast it grew before. I shave my head every winter. Not because everything’s dying and not because everything that pretends to die will come back, but because there’s not much else to do. I moved to Iowa and shaved my head. I left my partner of seven years and started dating someone seven years younger than me. My dad and my new partner’s mom died the same week. A year passed. I want to be in a place and time I’ve been, but differently so. I move to Idaho and shave my head. I shave my head to announce my arrival.
Yes, I’ve arrived.
The first time I shaved my head, a second-year poet in my workshop said it looks very even. When my head is shaved, I become a baby duck after every shower for weeks and regret it.
I google pictures of trans man with shaved head because I don’t have any delusions about how I look and don’t want the internet to lie to me by showing me pictures of Zac Efron.
A trans man on TikTok shaves his head and shaves a little extra off from the corners of his face by his temples with no guard to square his face out.
When I got my first the haircut, I was twelve and my mom made me promise to wear makeup every day I left the house. Tasha clipped my hair for 10 years and never used a razor. Just the hand razor on my neck. When she’d swipe the little razor up my neck to the back of my hairline, the friction sounded like nice scissors on fabric. Even. Careful.
I scroll down to the bottom of every trans guy YouTuber’s page to the Hi my name is and this is my voice 1 day on T videos. And they are all sweet and floppy 18 or 19 and 10 years ago and I am 29 and now.
When I was 19, 10 years ago, I watched these videos of a trans man and his wife. In the first video, he’s seated in a recliner and wearing an Affliction shirt and his wife is standing behind him, looking into the camera telling him that he found those videos of other guys trapped in women’s bodies so helpful—to pay it forward to some other guy.
I showed these videos to my college girlfriend. Every week we’d watch the wife, in her weekly wife update videos, say that she was mourning the loss of her wife and her lesbian identity. We’d watch the trans man flex and smile and blush into the camera. We stopped watching the videos.
10 years ago, he was 10 years older than I was. Every year for a few years I’d have a thought when I was falling asleep or at the grocery store or driving that I had time, or that I was running out.
TR Brady is a writer and fiber artist from Arkansas. TR holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Their work has appeared in Tin House, Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. TR is the co-founder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor and lives in Moscow, Idaho. More of their work can be found at: trbradypoet.com.