To the Silver-Haired Runner
You’re running, and I’m running, too. You run in black shorts, black tank, unremarkable shoes—nothing bright or flashy, not the hot magenta or neon green favored by most runners on this path, including me. But the true marvel is your hair, that long silver rope swinging down your back, keeping time with every footfall. Sterling as the sun strikes it, not coarse or fine but wavy as cursive, the occasional strand coming loose from its bind, clinging to your forehead like a circumflex hovering above a letter.
Daily, I look for you, a moving beacon among the high-season fences and low-season lattice. This long promenade never un-peopled, but early enough, fewer-peopled, the pink light of sunrise before the orange light of sun risen, pockets of shade still gaping between the small stucco motels and the one corporate monstrosity, behind the Yelp-famous smoothie shop with a line stretching clear to the amphitheater. Shopkeepers sweep as they flick their cigarettes, and gulls chase butts they’ve mistaken for crumbs.
I know, or at least I want to believe, that running is a chosen practice for you, a long-time, self-renewing ritual—no doctor’s orders, no trying to fit in a mother-of-the-bride dress or defray some menopausal symptom I haven’t faced yet. (This is the era of everyone warning women my age of horrors yet to come, the subtext of which seems to be shrivel up and die or soon enough you’ll wish you were dead.)
I like how you lean into this heat: extending not restricting your stride, trusting the pigeons will scatter as you approach, your face set in the most serene expression of tenacity—somewhere between ease and strain, but always certain your strong legs will carry you—through tired, through aching, even beyond exhaustion. Sometimes I see you walking but never in defeat. I don’t know if you keep track of anything (time, pace, distance), but there are these conspicuous absences: no phone in your hand, no buds in your ears, no impulse, it seems, to tune out the morning boister. Meanwhile, I’m blasting Elton John or Celine Dion, some otherworldly voice that promises I don’t have to hear my huffing, my thumping, or the coffee guy whistling. (Wolf or sheep, I can’t say for sure, but I know I don’t want to find out.)
My own hair is tucked under a ball cap, perhaps the one that shouts POET, blue stitch on pink canvas, or the gray one with the rainbowed map of Florida (No Hate in Our State, though sadly, what state can be found without it?), or the white one with a black cat where the logo should be.
You see, Lydia—I don’t know your name, but for some reason, you look like a Lydia to me—the early part of my life, at my mother’s insistence, was spent on beauty, the relentless curation and self-conscious display. And alongside all the paranoid tending was the near-apocalyptic prepping for its wane.
“Her one rule about the curls was that I could never tell anyone they weren’t ‘natural.’”
In childhood, a girl’s beauty came from her curls, my mother proclaimed, which was why every twelfth Saturday she transformed our kitchen into a beauty shop. The tall yellow stool in the corner, which usually held newspapers with coupons yet to be clipped, became a salon chair, repositioned in the center of the room. There I sat, tea towel wrapped around my neck, body cloaked with an apron, and in my hand, the water glass into which my mother dipped her comb.
These home permanents took many hours, the whole morning at least, and required a spray bottle for spritzing in addition to the wet comb, pink, white, and blue curlers to make ringlets of varied size, and long intervals with the smelly solution burning into my scalp.
“Are you sure it’s supposed to feel so hot?” I’d ask every time. “It’s really stinging, Mom.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” she’d say, setting the timer on the microwave and browsing a magazine. “It’s tingling—that means it’s working.”
While we waited for my curls to set, I’d study the face on the Toni Silkwave box. I couldn’t tell if she was a teenage girl or a woman fully grown, but I knew she was “pretty as a picture”: young with light smooth skin (no pimples or wrinkles), her lips glossy and red, her cheeks rouged with upward brushstrokes, and in her one visible ear, a diamond stud that resembled a flower. Her hair looked soft, with full brown curls, her eyebrows thin and identically arced, her eyes made dramatic with dark pencil, lashes plumped with mascara. Even before kindergarten, I could identify the steps of her beauty ritual because they were the same steps my mother repeated daily in front of her bathroom mirror.
I also spent time considering the language on the box. I wondered if “Toni” could be a girl’s name (I liked it) and if Toni could be this girl’s name. I wondered about the difference between “body, waves, or curls” and why my mother always chose the box marked “curls.” But I wondered especially about the phrase “for normal hair.”
“What would be not normal hair?” I asked once, pointing to the words.
“Hair that’s very dry or very oily,” my mother replied.
“If you have that kind of hair, can you not get a home permanent?”
“Well, you don’t, so you’re not getting out of this.”
Even then, my mother could see right through me, could trace where my mind was headed and intercept me before the pass.
Her one rule about the curls was that I could never tell anyone they weren’t “natural.” As far as schoolmates and teachers needed to know, my hair had always curled on its own. Of course this also meant we could never stop perming it. I still remember studying for the SATs while my mother wound the curlers in tight rows and pinned them hard against my head. As I solved for x and shaded circles in my practice book, she treated each strand of hair with a solution that reeked like expired salad dressing. The years had not improved it.
Lydia, is it any wonder then that during this second part of my life, I’ve been running away from beauty?
If she knew me now, my mother would say I’ve won the race, outperformed all the other women in my division. “Blue ribbon for bad face.” I can hear her tsking, and under her tsk, a burble of rage. Hadn’t she taught me better than this? Had I really wasted so much of her time in training? No make-up in my drawers, no “anti-aging” products on my shelves, no gels or mousse (sacrilege!), just a bar of soap in the shower, a two-in-one conditioning shampoo, and a skin cream that doubles as sunblock.
As I got older, my mother used to say, “There is no graceful way for a woman to gray.” Men, including my father, could become “silver foxes,” while women—I regretted asking—were doomed to become "washed-out old hags.” Over time, her hair, which I had always known to be brown like mine, curly like mine, began to glow auburn in the sun with new hints of red and gold. I knew it wasn’t “natural,” wasn’t changing colors on its own. Without even searching, I found evidence: Clairol boxes discarded in the trash, stained gloves drying beside the sink, stinky bottles that didn’t coincide with my perms. But unlike her make-up, which my mother was perennially “touching up,” her hair dye passed through our house like an open secret.
My hair, Lydia, if you could see it under this cap, has begun its fabled metamorphosis. For a few years, I dyed it out of fear—not wanting to be graceless, not wanting to be old. Now, for several years, I haven’t. The last store-bought color, chestnut-something, washed away (it wasn’t permanent), while the new hue continues creeping in—ash at my temples, a thick curtain of white along my nape.
The pivot happened like a Florida storm: no warning, sudden and entire. One day I put down the Garnier Nutrisse in the beauty aisle and left it there for good. Clear as an announcement on the store’s PA: I didn’t want to carry any part of myself like a secret. I had done that before, in my teens and early 20s—hiding my queer heart from my mother the way she hid the gray in her hair. So, if I could honor the woman I love and go on to marry her with the honesty we both deserved, was I really going to cloak some other part of myself, diminish another truth that way? Maybe hair was always a metaphor, and I wanted to claim it, just as I had claimed my life, my love, as “normal.” Gray and gay! Gaily graying! So be it!
“The truth is, I have wanted to be immune to beauty all these years—not to pursue it, not to perceive it, and above all, not to care how I am perceived.”
The truth is, I have wanted to be immune to beauty all these years—not to pursue it, not to perceive it, and above all, not to care how I am perceived. The last part is the hardest for me.
Lydia, you run like a woman unconcerned with the gaze of strangers, not like that cliché of a woman who doesn’t know how beautiful she is, but like a woman who knows and isn’t shackled to her beauty. How can I learn this elegance of indifference? Is it wrong that I want to say your hair inspires me, that my eyes alight on it every morning, but not just alight—delight—in the unabashed silver, the glinting rebellion, refuting everything I have ever been told?
Just now I looked up the name Lydia, realizing I have never known a woman who answers to this name. Come to find out, it means “beautiful one.” Of course it does. No woman is ever going to outrun the concept of beauty, is she? We can sprint toward other things—strength, endurance, joy—but aren’t those beautiful, too? I don’t know if days age well, but I know I prefer the morning to the evening in a way I never preferred my youth to middle age. That’s what they call this, Lydia. The middle. My favorite place to start a story.
You’re ahead of me in this mysterious foray. No doubt you’ve endured comments about your hair. Why does every woman want to tell you how brave it is to go gray but how she could never do that in a million years because it wouldn’t look “natural” on her like it looks on you? Squeezing your arm, sighing. “You just have the face/bone structure/complexion for it.”
Last summer I went to see the Barbie movie with a chorus of friends and acquaintances, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years. When the lights slowly raised at the end of the film, I was still humming “Closer to Fine” as the woman beside me gasped, “Do you know how gray your hair has gotten in the back?” I nodded. That I knew—but not what to say next. Sometimes it feels like an explanation is expected (shades of “are you really gay, or is this just a phase?”); sometimes I have to shake the feeling that other women want an apology from me (“I’m letting us all down and will get right back to disguising myself shortly”).
Lydia, there’s no right thing to say, is there, and no right way to avoid the kite-string tug of beauty on every windy day? But this day, the last of my 44th year, let me offer a small gesture of solidarity, unbidden by anyone and likely unnoticed by you: I’ll let my hair down, literally, which is to say, metaphorically, too. I’ll run with my brown-and-silver no-longer-curls unbound. It’s always windy at the beach, so I’ll expect hair in my mouth mingled with sand, slapping my cheeks, obscuring my view, tangling into salty snarls. Today I’ll run like I’ll never get winded, never have to slow down. I’ll run like nothing is chasing me—not beauty, not age—and when I see you in the changing light, I’ll wave.
About the Author
Julie Marie Wade is the author of 20 collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House, 2023), selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize. Her forthcoming collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024, selected by Michael Martone as the winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, and Quick Change ARTIST (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla as the winner of the 2023 Anhinga Press Poetry Prize. Wade is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach. You can find her online at www.juliemariewade.com.
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Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
Header photo by Jamie Street.
