The Fine Toothed Comb

An unexpected loneliness: nit-combing through one's own hair.

I thought it was a particularly bizarre moment of self-pity, and then I remembered the monkeys. Huddled up on ledges; one furtive and brisk with their tiny hands, attention flicking between the meta-environment of other monkey dynamics and the micro-environment of lice and hair and scalp, and the other, sprawled in a stupor of intimate practical touch and shut-eye.

And then I think of the confessional spaces of hairdressing salons and then I think of my mother brushing my hair and then I think, it is perhaps the most expected loneliness of all.