These days, Charlotte kept her hair short, cut in a sensible bob she wore with her work blazer, chapstick and a go-getting frown. Over the past decade, she had been promoted a few times at her law firm, but beyond the initial feeling of being appreciated, she didn’t feel proud of her accomplishments. When she looked in the mirror, all she saw was a woman nearing middle age, greying underneath her dyed bob, eyes dulled, unable to smile.
Law had been her father’s idea, and Charlotte had done her best to abide by his objectives for her. But her first year of law school was difficult: the studies seemed dry, her professors humourless, and Charlotte felt lost and unmotivated in a crowd of ambitious peers, ashamed of herself for struggling this way. Sometime around Christmas, looking for something else, she happened across an online haircare forum. Reading the posts written by the forum’s users, she felt their passion for the subject they all shared. The forum’s entire raison d’être was the growth and maintenance of long, beautiful hair. Faced with this unapologetic devotion to something so seemingly frivolous, Charlotte felt something buried inside her bloom. Immediately, she joined the forum and set herself the goal of growing her then shoulder-length hair down to her waist. When she shared her goal with the others, and received a first wave of enthusiastic encouragement, she felt an intensity of purpose she had never felt before. Night after night, alongside her law studies, Charlotte sat in front of her laptop and read the posts of her peers on the forum, read the advice written by faceless users with usernames that soon became familiar to her, and tried out their home remedies for looking after her scalp and avoiding split ends. She purchased her first whole aloe vera leaf at a farmer’s market nearby, sectioned it to remove the gel and make a pomade; she bought castor oil to nourish her scalp and ends. She began conducting experiments using items from her fridge—egg white masks, beer rinses, honey washing—and shared her findings with her friends on the forum. She received replies and praise for her work, much more so than ever happened at university, and she began putting more and more of her efforts into her hair.
Soon, she was made a moderator and invited to join a secret group in the forum’s system called the Coven of Long-haired Enchantment. Together, members of the Coven spent hours poring over articles about the lipid composition of hair oils, gathering data on the behaviour of protein on different hair textures, and making this information available to other users on the forum.
Charlotte didn’t become involved in the goings-on at university. She sat in her lectures with her hair smeared in oil, wrapped in a shower cap and hidden under a beanie, and never went out for drinks with her fellow students. It was other members of the forum she considered her true friends. Those were people she came home to and told about her day. The forum members knew about her dreams, the things that enraged her, and which hair type she had. No matter how dull her daily commute, how frustrating her class assignments, how uncertain her job prospects, the forum felt like home. Here, every personal achievement took a backseat to the topic of hair, and Charlotte wasn’t a middling law student; she was charlalot_24, a Long-haired Enchantress. She was consulted on treatments, and thanked her for her contribution to the forum’s well of knowledge. She had never heard the voices of her forum friends, or really seen their faces—profile pictures were taken from behind so as to show progress on growth and conserve anonymity. And it didn’t matter. Hair was all that mattered. Hair was her everything, her greatest achievement in the world despite mediocre marks and her sense that she lacked any special talent.
After three years on the forum, Charlotte’s hair reached her goal length. Her forum friends celebrated this milestone with her, sending her pictures of leaping horses. Charlotte wore her hair down at home, and took photo after photo of it in her bathroom mirror. She swelled with pride when she felt the ends stroke the small of her back.
Six months after her graduation, an uncle helped Charlotte secure an entry-level position in a law firm. Even then, hair was the thing she thought about on lunch breaks and as soon as she came home. Eating her sandwich, she worked out herbal concoctions to make over the weekend, or how best to keep a batch of flax seed gel. She went to work with her hair braided into one of the buns she was famous for on the forum—but work was still dull, so dull. It was all paperwork and placating clients.
Years passed. Quite unexpectedly, Charlotte garnered her first promotion, one originally destined for a colleague who went on maternity leave. Regardless, the promotion was hers, and with it came an increased workload. Strangely, her motivation increased along with the workload, and work began to mean something. This left her with fewer hours to catch up on forum affairs. Charlotte barely noticed that she was visiting the forum less and less, nor did she notice that, meanwhile, the forum itself was slowing down: people’s messages becoming less frequent, and not a single new member joining all winter.
In spring, after receiving a second promotion, Charlotte booked an appointment with a hairdresser for the first time in years. On the forum, hairdressers were known as butchers, prone to trimming precious length off one’s ends in excess of what had been promised. In other words, they were the enemy. Charlotte’s hairdresser fanned out her client’s long hair in front of the mirror and told her that, while it was in good condition, the length did no favours to her facial structure, that it seemed neither fresh nor modern, unsuited to the successful woman she was under way of becoming. Before she knew it, Charlotte’s waist-length achievement lay scattered on the beige tiles around her chair, and a new, fashionably layered hairstyle grazed the tops of her shoulder bones. She looked like every other woman in her firm.
Charlotte cried all night. Arriving at the firm the next day, she received approving looks from colleagues and by the time the first compliments rolled around she felt good about herself again. After that, her visits to the forum ceased altogether—why bother, since her long hair was gone.
Now, over a decade later, things have changed. The world is at war. Different forms of online interaction have emerged. And Charlotte’s life again feels dull, so dull—and lonely. Not one of her last relationships, all of them with colleagues from the firm, have worked out as she hoped. Every year, the administrative burdens of her job become harder to bear. Her flat, which she loved at first, is surrounded by construction work; an enormous block of flats is being built, and will soon eclipse the view from her bedroom and office entirely.
Charlotte tries to think about when she last felt joyful and carefree; from somewhere deep in her memories she recalls the forum, with its jolly purpose of helping people grow out their hair. It’s late at night, she should be in bed. But she opens her laptop and, out of curiosity, types the forum’s address into her search bar.
The page appears on her screen unchanged, just as it was all those years ago. The forum lay dormant. No new threads since 2017. Charlotte opens the latest one and lets her gaze run melancholy over the words written by people she remembers from the Coven of Long-haired Enchantment. For the first time in years, she sees emoticons nobody uses any longer. Even as their sight makes her smile, her heart contracts with sadness. Her former happy place is out of order. Life has moved on from old things.
Out of habit, she refreshes the page, and a new thread appeared.
The thread’s title bears her name. Charlotte feels her skin rise into gooseflesh.
She stares at her name for a moment. Then she clicks on it.
The thread is empty. Charlotte doesn’t know what that means. She refreshes the page again, and a post appears. It is written by her own old username: charlalot_24.
Trembling, Charlotte reads. Why have you stayed away for so long? The post is addressed to her. Why, it asks, did she leave, when she knew full well this was the only place she ever felt worthy?
Frozen on her office chair, Charlotte stares at her screen. Then, her ears catch a rustling sound, like fabric brushing against a microphone. The sound seems to rise from her laptop speakers. She looks closer and sees movement, fine tendrils of hair growing from the speakers’ pores, rising into the room. The hairs grow towards her, reaching for her face. Charlotte tries to move away, but it’s too late. The hair from the speakers has fused to the ends of her own, clean-cut bob, and is starting to pull her head towards the pale glow of the screen.
The post flickers in front of her eyes, and she hears a choir of voices strike up in the distance, voices she has never heard but instantly recognises; they are the voices of the Coven of Long-haired Enchantment. The voices of people whose messages she read night after night during her happiest, most carefree time, back when her insights were appreciated, and she contributed so willingly to the faceless whirl of the online forum.
“Come back to us,” the voices chant, “There is nothing for you here.”
Charlotte feels tears stream down her face, dark drops of them landing on her keyboard. The screen glows with benevolence. The hair is no longer pulling at her head, but it’s keeping her close. Charlotte can’t tell how much time has passed. She raises her eyes to the window, looking out across the blurry street. Above the dark, imposing structure of the block of flats halfway risen from the ground, she can still see the horizon. Dawn is breaking. Once the building works continue and the block of flats continues to rise, her view will be obstructed forever. Her flat will sit in the behemoth’s shadow. This is probably the last sunrise her window will ever show.
There is nothing left for you here.
Charlotte feels the hair guiding her closer to the screen, whose surface ripples in front of her face like a radiant pool of water, something she might reach through without resistance.
We’re all waiting for you. Come back to a time when things were good.
Faintly, Charlotte thinks she can hear music: pop songs they all listened to on the forum, soft male voices singing about being in love. She sees soft colours, pale pinks and frothy greens, flowers the forum members like to braid into their hair; she sees smiling faces, dancing on dewy grass. Something is blooming in her, a soft light amid the dark steel of storm clouds that have patterned her days. A soft pink sunrise, and her hair long on a silk pillow, reflecting the early rays. All these women giving her a place in which to be herself. Charlotte has stopped crying. It’s all there, still. All there for her to join.
Come back, she hears them say. We’re waiting for you.