You Did What To Your What?

“You did what, with what…to what?”

It honestly did not sound that bizarre when I said it.

“I said I pulled out my pubic hair one too many times because the damn things are starting to turn gray.”

“I just don’t get why you would try to pull them things out with your bare hands anyway. That’s what your ass gets!” She cackled.

“That’s how they do it at the wax place. They slather on warm wax with a stick, let it cool and rip it from your skin with their bare hands. They only use the strips to clean up. It isn’t as bizarre as you think–”

“But why did you try to do with your bare hands what they do with all that wax?”

I had already grown tired from my husband’s lack of compassion for yet another straw on my quarter-life crisis camel’s back. Now she was pouring salt on my wound, too.

“It’s funny. Ole mature pxxsy having ass. Lol.”

I wanted to throw her deuces in the manner of my two silver strands – one leaning left and the other sprouting towards the right, both in utter defiance of my well-manicured muff rule. I’d worked so hard – the last 10-12 years or so – to keep my pubic region in check, plucking, cutting, shaving and even waxing them into submission only for Pinky and the Brain to unleash an evil plan on me. I, at 24, became victim to graying private hairs.

You might think it’s another melodramatic attempt at attention. Another notch in my sympathy belt, and you’re just an onlooker in my one-woman show. I understand, but until the dermal duo appeared I thought everyone picked at their nether regions as if picking bolls of cotton. Al Bundy propped his hand in the most comfortable, TV watching-ready position, and some times I pricked the coarsest, kinkiest fibers or fiddled with a burgeoning bush while contemplating tomorrow’s to-do list. No biggie.

Then a kindred, YouTube spirit informed me and thirty thousand other viewers about her embarrassing condition, trichotillomania (trick what?), and I hopped on Wiki to see how in the world this heavenly vision could be imperfect. I teetered between screens when it hit me like a misdirected frisbee.”By God, I’ve got all this hair up top that I can’t figure out anything to do with, while I’ve spent enough money on razors and depilatories for my coochie to fund a small country. I’m crazy.”

Still, I continued to crouch over toilets holding my labia majora with one hand, and a pair of tweezers in the other, searching and destroying the most unsightly offenders. Stressed at work? Pull this one. Husband has an attitude? Prick that one too. Bored and in need of physical stimulation? Try three at one time. There, that feels better. And honestly, it did, till I discovered two friends.

Tired of the shaving and skin stripping, I gave Patty a rest. “Just rock out with your crop out and we’ll be back to bare in a few weeks.” Husband seemed okay with having a wolf for a wife in spite of our commitment to every-day-for-30-days sex. “I’m a grown woman, and he knows his way around a grown woman. We’re good.”

He sat at his desk, zoned into a documentary. I sat on the bed, legs sprawled in my usual, casual fashion, fingers outlining the crevices of God’s handy work. “Something doesn’t feel right,” I muttered.

I jumped up, leaned forward and came face-to-face with a pair of menacing, silky smooth strands. And even after I showed them to my loving husband, who assured me that they – and I – would be alright, I signed into Facebook Messenger to ask a friend.

“My cousin says cut them off. I just can’t believe your crazy ass has been using your hands!”

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Courtney Akinosho
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