We are living in increasingly superstitious times. We are looking for signs. Everything carries with it the hint of an omen or a prophecy. We wash our hands religiously; we put our faith in foam masks ordered in bulk and sold out of a souvenir shop. We can’t remember if we washed our hands for long enough, so we do it again to be sure. (We is me here). A cough outside my apartment may just be a cough, or something more…medieval.
At this very moment, I have a long, wiry, gray hair growing out of my left eyebrow. I noticed it the other day and have been thinking about what to do with it ever since. It's the length of my pinky and has a second hair sprouting from the end of it so that it looks extra crazy up close. The question isn't whether it’s weird and I should remove it (it is and I should); the question is whether the eyebrow hair is magic and what happens when I do.
When I first got to Batumi and only thought I'd be here for a month, I shaved my beard off for the first time in ten years. I wanted to keep my mustache, though, because it's rare you get to see what you look like with a mustache without the risk of other people seeing, too. You’ll look stupid, obviously, but it's one of those things you have to see to believe. (You is me here.)
Katya didn't care either way, so off the beard came and on the mustache stayed. To say I looked stupid doesn't really cut it. At best, I looked like my dad on vacation in the '80s and at worst like a criminal who does weird things on sailboats. And wouldn’t you know it: three weeks later, everything went to shit.
I'm not saying my beard-shaving and/or mustache-saving caused this crisis, but by the time my beard grew back enough to soften the criminality a little, all the barbershops had closed. Now I've been slingshotted to the opposite end of the facial hair experimentation spectrum and I no longer know what's safe.
That's the dreadful thing about uncertain times—the uncertainty, plus the dread. That and the cracks that start to form in a person’s logic, cracks through which all kinds of crazy shit can get in and out—including, of course, long, weird (possibly magically protective) eyebrow hairs.