When my hair is gray...
by Jessica deCourcy Hinds

A twenty-year-old woman is nothing but a shell of sparks.

One day, she sees a woman whose shell has split, peeled like an orange to reveal flames. A woman whose voice alone is the color of fire. Who is she? A gray-haired woman she passes on the street. This is who she will be in twenty-five years. Seeing this woman gives her courage. Strong, soaring, the woman’s long gray hair flaps like wings.

An older friend, one already blessed with gray, speaks of invisibility. No one sees me anymore. Men used to turn their heads to look at me, now they’d rather stare at the cracks in the sidewalk.

But when you’re twenty, you are a crack. You’re a vein, reaching across the earth, a line on a map, searching. Where? Where?

She promises herself a head of gray hair. I cannot be invisible if I speak, if I am heard. I will walk through the world without feet; I will walk with my voice. Wings of gray will carry me.