The morning daily measurement has become a seemingly never-ending ceremony.
After shampooing and drying her hair, running his fingers through her drying hair, stretching and securing it in a braid.
Her daily sigh is never far from that moment when he puts in that final twist and secures the braid.
Pulling her hair until her head rests on the same hole through which he threads her braided locks.
Across the board, she knows, he installed a measuring tape, and a few seconds later it reaches the tension in her scalp, as he pulls her hair back, and then she hears him announce the length of the hair.
And the agreement between them, sail through her head, and build further her anticipation, turning into a palpable abdominal pain.
For a long time now, he no longer just reads the length, but starts with the length missing, and the number has so slowly dropped, from five centimeters left its thirty-five centimeters long, to, three centimeters length short and thirty-seven centimeters long, to two and thirty-eight, and then to that breathless, less then a centimeter, just a little longer, and so it has been for the last nerve wracking days, nearly forty, nearly there.
And so he measures and calls, calls and rips her soul, turns her body, burns her dreams.
For when he reaches the forty centimeters, she dreams that will not even read the length out load, not say anything and she will feel the thrust of a knife on a wooden board, or the snip of the scissors when he will cut his hair.
And then, then it will mean just another short wait, a time in which he will weave a rope out of hair. A rope so personal that only she will ever be wrapped in it, and when she would be so bound, she will finally be his.