He gulped at my neck, at the tingling skin and stray hairs, making them slick with his saliva. The crook of his front teeth dug into me sharper than others had before him. Yes. I craned my neck, moaned to tell him to continue, he took to it like a dog at its first chew toy. Devour me, devour me, I chanted to myself. Destroy me.

When I leave his place, my hair still sticky from his ministrations, I feel disappointed that I hadn’t dissolved, combusted, vanished. Gone somewhere from which I could not return.

I used to chew my hair when I was young. It was not an inherent habit, it was one I adopted from a friend, an artistic girl who always wore her hair in a headband—an attempt, I suppose, to keep her hair away from her mouth. So I wore headbands too, pulled the hair around to my lips, and supped.

The taste is as salty as it was then.

I shuffle through his streets uneasily. It feels like they know how I used him. I can tell I’m not welcome here anymore. But that’s fine. I think I chose him well, all things considered. I don’t have to come to this part of town any time soon. And by the time I do, I have a feeling the streets won’t recognize me anymore. I will have someone else with me.

It feels different this time when I get home to my second-floor apartment, to the dingy little kitchen with no windows where I dig out the pot, the candles, the compost and seeds.

It feels like a new life is just around the corner. Like I’m dusting off bookshelves in a library full of light, where the particles can dance in the sun one last time before their era ends and a new one begins.

I light the three candles with a shaking hand. Protection for your past, present, and future. The lighter was a gift from an old sister, whose smoking habit saw her catch me behind the gym, trying to light up with a stolen match while all the others cackled at each others’ changing bodies in the bathroom. She hadn’t asked me any questions, just snatched the match out of my trembling fingers and replaced it with this same scuffed up lighter. Taught me how it worked and only coughed when my smoke came out not like nicotine but something sweeter. This was the ancestry I would pass on.

Cutting off my hair gives me a thrill every time. This is the moment that feels most like conception to me, the natural meeting of my body and his body with the idea of you. I knew it would be hair from the moment I found this sacrament. Hair is the life that bloomed all over my stomach, my back, the sacred walls of my inner thighs. Hair is what kept me sane the years before I could make my body over again. I cultivated it like a secret garden, its growth flourishing just beneath pants and full-length skirts, under tights and long stockings and leggings. Away from the whispered accusations of my peers, slithering under my feet like the dead leaves of fall. Unnatural. As though they knew anything of nature. As though any of the lessons we had been taught were natural. As though the bursting forth of blood and viscera and somehow within all of that, a baby, was any more natural than what I was doing for you now, pottering around in my tiny kitchen, each quiet action taken with care.

Now my hair will be the base of your being. I place it carefully in the pot of simmering water, speaking hallowed words over it:

May the life in these scraps carry over to the water.

May you be consumed by my flesh, my blood, and my tears.

May this create for you a shelter that you may come into my arms and be cradled with care.

And like that, I trust that the ritual will take. When I strain out the infused water. When I carefully cut open a vein to add more of my being. When I select a seed to let steep in the mix for an hour. When I plant it, my hands scrummy with blood and dirt and tears. I am no longer saying I hope I hope I hope.

Instead it is You will, you will, you will.