careful when you're falling from great heights

now listening: “heights” by 53 Thieves

No, bobby pins cannot salvage an atrocious bang day—something my remaining three allegedly functional brain cells should've reminded me before I sheared my face-framing pieces into stubby forehead bangs the day before our Eid al-Adha celebration.

In fairness, let me preface by saying this was an improvement from previous years. This year, I actually waited until summer break before...experimenting with my follicles. Let's just say I was grateful for the painstaking 2 months and 19 days I had to grow out the damage until school started again.

Still, I always seemed to trim too soon. And too much. At least according to my hair chronicles, trimming is rarely a wise choice. 

This same summer, my mom and I were elbow-deep in our pinkish-white hydrangeas, pruning their leafy sprawl. It does seem counterintuitive snipping away at what looks perfectly healthy. Yet regularly pruning plants does carry its merit: it removes auxin-rich shoot tips and permits cytokinins, a plant hormone, to transport from the roots to activate the side axillary buds, which alllow plants to grow bushy in an outward direction (thank you, Mrs. Brewer, for making AP Bio mildly useful).

That’s precisely the incongruity: trimming can mean both cutting away and refining.

I can't help but see the same tension mirrored in Field's and Sexton’s interpretations of Icarus. Sexton celebrates his efforts; Field mourns his fall into mediocrity. Maybe trimming is how we avoid becoming Icarus—refining ourselves just enough to avoid melting in the sun's wrath. But in trimming too much, do we lose the ability to simply attempt flight? We may unconsciously trim parts of ourselves to appease both ourselves and our surroundings: sure, most obviously our hair, but also our sentences, our loudness, our excess...the parts that might just flare too brightly in the wrong room. Is trimming refusing to see how high we could've flown? In this sense, Field was right: there's a quiet death in sinking into what's expected.

And perhaps there is defiant glory in lack of refinement itself. As Sexton implied, maybe the real fall isn't flying too high and "plunging down" but rather trimming your wings so much that you cannot fathom soaring.

So to Icarus, I warn to be "careful when you're falling from great heights" (53 Thieves, “heights”). But that isn't to suggest you should never have fallen.