as a child.

he once told me that the thing with his hair began after he started skiing. i divined the rest.

he was all of four years old at the time. four years old, and he had already met, and fallen head over heels for, his one true love. (even i dont pretend that my place in his heart was nearly as great as that of skiing; neither should anyone else who knew him.)

on the heels of intuiting - for what other real knowledge do little children possess, other than intuition - that he had found his soul on the snowy mountains, he surely had to resign himself to the fact that his raison d'etre was, for all intents and purposes, seasonal. due to his family's location in the world, he couldnt fly down the crystalline slopes but a few months out of the year.

no sooner did he fall in love than he had a long distance relationship on his hands, and this must have pained him in his gut - for that's where dread lies, alongside intution, which makes the two so easily confusable, to say nothing of the fact that they're often one and the same.

and so the hair thing was an outer extension of his guts, not his heart. his heart always belonged to the winter, to the mountains, and it longed for them always, but it was also always able to keep its steady rhythm, measuring time with a drumbeat. his gut, however, had to ache and sob with the seasons until winter was finally approaching, at which point it would turn over like a swollen wave, releasing all its tension with a cathartic crash.

at that magical time, when the air became decidedly crisper, his hair would naturally become a whitish blonde - it's true color, close to snow. then, from the tops of mountains, it would soak up the sun and take on a golden hue, more like wheat. but during the rest of the year, his hair would gradually assume different colors and shades, echoing the different, kaleidoscopic tones of the remaining three seasons - greens, browns, reds, always a little blue. his hairs had roots in his head, but those roots extended, invisibly, to his gut - always waiting for it to cease its rocking and wailing and to finally be at ease, content with the ability to ski, then left to start the whole changing process up again after his last run of the season.

his mother noticed the color changing soon enough to be able to dye it -whitish blonde - so that no one ever knew. she rightly decided that too much of this particular changing couldn't be good for a child's sense of self. even if it was natural.

then, when he was thirteen, she decided to let his hair color itself of its own extraordinary volition. and this brought about the peculiar phenomenon of people thinking that his parents had let him experiment - wildly, they would have liked to add - with hair dye at a premature age; when in fact, his hair was, for the very first time, in its natural state.

when i was with him, and we'd bump into someone he hadn't seen in a while, they'd always marvel - some of them smirking, some of them not - at his hair color. they'd ask him what color it had been the last time they saw him. they'd laugh. and his gut - which was also connected by invisible sinews to his face - would ease a bit to allow him the faintest hint of a smile. it was a smile like that on the mona lisa, which we saw together once. it was that smile that says, in the face of insecure scrutiny: i know exactly who i am.