If upon death the soul leaves the body through natural holes (eyes, mouth, ears, the navel), then to pluck a single hair is to foreshadow a little bit of this demise. Properly done by the roots -- so as to trick the singular nerve assigned to the arrector pili into a kind of tension-and-release -- leaving nothing but a tiny little hole in its wake, a wet pinprick one can feel against the air.

It is something one can practice at. I myself have tried often (the minimal resolution of touch is ten nanometres; the width of a human hair is seventeen-hundred times that; the width of a heartstring a million times that) and I can say that at this point my soul has many little holes in it. There are many different tensions of departure: young strands wet and deep, older ones harder and drier. My skin is used to many such departures. Where the holes have been made, a hardness remains, a cracking under the skin: the soul leaking out.

The body is then a vessel plugged by so many reddened little insect-legs, their ends dipped in ink. There is a kind of meditation to all of this. I spend minutes at a time, before my room mirror, tweezer in hand, plucking, airing, dreaming.