#waxing

I saw the moon in a halo hanging out with Jupiter last night.

I’ve always hated pubic hair and Brendan was like a satyr of a man so we decided a fun together activity would be waxing each other. We picked up a home kit and sequestered ourselves in the bathroom.

My first sign that things were about to go horribly wrong was that the first thing we saw in the kit were warnings about how to not horrifically burn yourself. But I had not yet developed a healthy sense of fear. We were going to have an adventure.

Brendan and I stripped and crowded around the heating wax, excited and silly, looking forward to our future hairless states. We debated what to wax first and since I loathed having crotch hair I volunteered my pubes to begin.

The first hurdle proved to be getting the wax where we wanted it. The sticky mess resisted the wooden slathering sticks with all its might and adhered to anything else. Arms, countertop, sink, walls, until finally I smeared some where we were trying to go.

I slapped paper onto the malleable wax and waited for it to set. I asked Brendan if he’d pull it but his eyes welled up with sadness and he protested he couldn’t possibly hurt me until I sighed and tried to rip out my own pubes.

I have seldom experienced worse pain than that moment. It was excruciating and I fully screamed and fell off the edge of the tub where I’d been sitting as a fiery relentless burning agony settled into my crotch. The only saving grace was I’d started off to one side rather than going down the landing strip.

Both Brendan and I were horrified to see that every hair follicle I’d ripped up was now welling with blood. I staunched the bleeding and turned watery eyes on him. “Your turn.”

Brendan was not a coward. He would not let me suffer alone. But he also didn’t want a crotch full of blood, so he smeared a bit up the thicket of his leg hair and ripped. He threw his whole body into a painful silent scream, pounding his fist on the counter as all the cells in the bare patch of his leg lodged a formal protest.

We stewed in silence after that, pain throbbing along our bodies with each heartbeat, balefully regarding the wax on the counter. We didn’t want to give up but the pain register of this task was well beyond our capability to bear. We looked at each other. I said, “Maybe it will hurt less on my leg.”

He looked at me dubiously but we both knew my leg hair wasn’t as dense. The last wax that would ever touch me was slathered on a modest patch of shin hair. I stared at it for a long time, steeling myself against the coming fury of my follicles. I ripped. I managed not to scream but I clenched every muscle in my body against the fresh wash of unpleasantness.

My leg didn’t bleed but I tapped out. It was too much, we couldn’t do it. We tidied the bathroom as best we could we kept finding new wax patches where we’d made a mess for weeks afterward. It took a few hours before we could laugh about the misadventure. My two bald spot were stark for the next few weeks, matching Brendan’s single missing strip of leg hair.

Lunar Cats