Brenna's invitation was so casual that I thought she may have sent the message to the wrong person. Her text came in the morning, while I was unpackaging my next restoration piece, a degrading cyanotype, at the studio:

You're joking, I responded.

Over coffee the previous week, I'd made some kind of self-deprecating joke about keeping this rat's nest out of my face so I could actually see the pages I was meant to restore. Cosmetic upkeep was more Brenna's thing than mine, with her long lashes and blonde coils curated to a budding career in journalism. An initial interview about my conservation project for her Local News column had turned into a series of evenings over coffee or a pint, where talk of work mingled with the goings-on in city center, politics, and a mutual love for Mutefish, one of Dublin's worshiped underground rock bands.

Besides the scattering of brushes and a can of Klucel G, my phone pinged with a new message.

Shears? I fired back dubiously. My hands threaded through thick strands of hair, the ends frayed from constant fussing.

And so here I was, just shy of seven o'clock, on Brenna's stoop. The previous hour had seen me wondering what to bring to Brenna's house. Passing the multiple stalls on Grafton Street to catch the bus, I'd briefly entertained flowers. But then the first few minutes after entry would be spent trying to locate a vase. And what if Brenna didn't have a vase? It hardly seemed she would be home long enough to care for anything more than a patient succulent. So the flowers were a no-go.

I did have the forethought to bring along some hair dye that had been sitting in my bathroom cupboard for a few months. Electric blue. I wasn't sure what possessed me to put it in the bag–maybe a part of me had wanted to impress Brenna, that I too could be daring, bold. Only I'd forgotten to bring bleach, or gloves, or anything else that would make the hair dye itself a viable portion of the evening. The bottle rattled mockingly in its cardboard box while I knocked and waited for Brenna to answer.

Was this a thing that friends did often, visit each other and do their hair? A sudden loneliness struck white hot, rooting me to the concrete of the front stoop. I hadn't developed any pattern of friendship seeking, especially not since moving here. It was all work, work. Why hadn't I made more of an effort to make friends, or keep the ones I had?

Back state-side, in college, a friend from art history class–we'll call him Ry– had invited me to his apartment in a similarly spontaneous manner. His second-story apartment was haphazardly bohemian, with a warm-hued mandala tapestry hanging on the wall and a hookah with tasseled pillows scattered on the hardwood floor. During the first few visits, the upperclassmen he was friends with often engaged in pedantic conversations, during which I served as the captive audience.

I became the friend who would smile when cued by a sideways glance, to validate Ry's profound ideas on human existence with a nod of my head. I'd become Kath, the Conservation Girl, and who knows what I actually did, because that would involve including me in conversation. I was just patient, or quiet enough to earn a return invite.

One night, Ry invited me over to share a bottle of wine, alone. He'd poured a single glass–the last remaining clean one–sipped without breaking eye contact, and handed it over to me. It was supposed to be a gift, this sharing of red tannins. It was then I realized, perhaps belatedly, that his intentions were not within the realm of friendship, and perhaps they never had been.

On his second glass, we relocated to a bean bag chair.

"Have you ever been with both at the same time?" He asked.

"Both?"

"A man and a woman, you know, together. Are you into that?"

It seemed like he really wanted me to be into that.

His hand traced just beneath the hem of my skirt, on my bare thigh, and he tried to press his vinegary lips onto mine. I pulled away. The alcohol morphed the indignity on his face into a grotesque sneer. Hadn't he worked so hard to woo me with hookah and conversation, to finally be rewarded for his efforts? My memory holds the notion of standing and excusing myself. I think I may have apologized.

That similar, heart-thudding feeling rushed to me as I teetered there on Brenna's stoop. The feeling that something was about to happen. Only this time, there was no booze, and I wasn't worried about whether my skirt was too short or inviting. I'd stopped wearing skirts long ago, and I spent many years practicing uninviting the interest of others.

When I came out in college to my friends– including Ry–as bisexual, I thought that would be the end of it. One and done. Turns out I have had to come out multiple times, sometimes when I do or do not want to, sometimes to the excessive celebration or consternation of whoever it was that I came out to. I grew tired very quickly. Then I stopped coming out at all. And then I forgot what it was like to be queer, which is, to have my existence interpreted as queer. And my desires became my own, which is to say I had no idea what my desires were, because they were so abstract to everyone else that they hardly made sense to me. After a while I accepted the silence, and so I unwittingly, willingly, ended up back in the closet.

But then there was Brenna. Her hand had started to linger on my shoulder at our farewells. She looked into the future, unflinching. And when I deflected a personal question, she would look at me frankly, and say, come now Kath, what do you really think? And I felt selfish, and starry, and queasy all at once. 

The digital clock on my lock screen read 7:05. I raised my hand to knock again, but before my knuckles could rap the wood, the door opened.

Brenna was in jeans, a step down from her slacks and sleeveless button downs. Her hair flowed over one shoulder. When she brought me inside, Bon Chanson, our favorite Mutefish number, was playing on an old-fashioned stereo. We laughed about the blue hair dye, and she took the box anyway. Upstairs we went to her matchbox bathroom, where an arsenal of shears and brushes greeted us.

"I want all of it off," I said, sitting on a stool near the sink. 

"All of it?" She asked, smiling coyly as she draped a towel around my shoulders.

The woman in the mirror nodded.

Her chest brushed against my back as she maneuvered for a good angle. Her practiced fingers made sense of my threads of hair. I asked about her tattoo, a long line running the length of her forearm, with small horizontal ticks.

"It's Ogham for the Irish word, méadaigh," She said. My scalp tingled each time she tugged a strand.

"Méadaigh," I repeated. The word was silky and unfamiliar on my tongue.

"It means grow," she said, drawing nearer to my ear. The snipped hair tickled our noses and dusted our clothes.

"Have you ever done anything like this before?" She asked, wielding the bottle of dye in her hand. But she wasn't wondering about the color.

I glanced at myself, at the person in the mirror, with dark hair that now barely touched her jawline. Brenna was also looking at that woman with measured curiosity.

"I– no, I haven't," I admitted.

She popped the cap off, reached for a pair of gloves, and paused again. "Are you sure you want to?"

When the night was over, I hoped I'd come downstairs, weightless. Perhaps my hair would be electric blue. Maybe Brenna's would be, too. Perhaps we would each dye a strip at the base of our necks, a secret known only to us. Our fingers would be smeared with blue, like the deepening sky outside her window, like her eyes, and we would try to rub it away with a damp towel but I wouldn't want it off, not really. I wanted her fingerprints padding ink over me until the break of blue dawn.