This morning when I left Kamran’s apartment, there was an adorable little squirrel hanging off the side of one of the trees near the garden outside of his building. It scampered off as soon as it saw me, and just as it hit one of the top branches, something plopped down onto my head and shirt.
Figuring it was water, I kept walking, but then I remembered a day a couple of years ago when I walked under a scaffolding near Kamran’s building just as the construction crew dropped some planks onto it from above. I had felt some debris shower down on me but hadn’t thought to look at myself in the mirror to check on the damage. After my 20-minute subway ride to work, some visitors were already waiting outside of the office door, so I got them settled in and then finally caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom and realized that I’d had black dust all over my face the entire time from the scaffolding.
So to be safe this time, I felt around on my shirt for the water spot and came up with a fingerful of bird poop instead. I stopped where I was, popped open my compact, and found the splotch of it in my hair, as well. Now, bird poop in my hair doesn’t really gross me out or anything like it should. Somehow Kamran dropping his feces in my hair or something seems weird, but bird poop in a walking city seems inevitable. The problem is that I don’t have normal girl hair that would allow me to simply pull the stuff out of my straight, flowing tresses; I have very soft curly hair that I’m basically afraid to touch for fear of making it uncurl–as someone once told me it would as a kid–and after living with curly hair for a lifetime, I would have no idea what to do with straight hair.
So I sort of patted the poop out the best I could, hoping that the remaining golden streak made it look as if I’d gotten highlights. And I went on to work, rubbing the poop between my fingers as I walked to dry it out. After riding the train and talking to a couple of my co-workers, I sat down at my desk and got out a mirror to reapply some lipgloss. And that’s when I saw that I had black hairs all over the side of my face. The side that I hadn’t looked at when I was searching for bird poop. I couldn’t remember walking under any scaffolding this morning, so I retraced my steps in my mind and realized that shortly before I said goodbye to Kamran this morning, I saw him trimming his sideburns in the bathroom mirror. Which means that when he hugged me before I walked out the door, he slathered my face in hair and didn’t bother to tell me.
This is going to be quite a day.
