I’ve suspected the end was coming for some time. It got harder and harder to get my hands on it. I started trolling the internet, asking friends if they had any to spare. And now, the axe has finally fallen. My favorite hair product has been discontinued. For a minute there, throwing myself off the balcony seemed a reasonable response.

The men in the audience can probably stop reading now. Maybe there’s football on. You all play football in April, right? Well, whatever. Bob Villa is always on somewhere, and I am having a grooming emergency.

I have wavy hair. I inhabit that weird world between straight and curly, the Bermuda Triangle of texture where things could go horribly wrong at any moment, up to and including death by kraken.

I didn’t even acknowledge the wavy until a year ago. My exasperated stylist threw down her brush in disgust and demanded, “Why do you do this to yourself?”

“This” was the endless combing and brushing and drying and straightening, the attempts to beat the wave into silky, flat submission.

“Because I don’t know how to deal with it,” I wailed, which was absolutely true. I had Bermuda Triangle head. You try dealing with that. They don’t teach you that in college. Women’s Studies, my ass.

I did the math. I have spent approximately 2,920 hours blow drying my hair straight, which only actually stayed straight if I happened to be spending the day in the Mojave. One speck of humidity. Just one! Well, you can imagine. That’s over 121 days of my life. I could’ve written another book in the amount of time I’ve spent getting a hand cramp and burning my scalp.

Then I found it. The hair product holy grail. The miraculous schmutz that tamed the beast, enhanced the wave and didn’t make me look like I had some unfortunate perm from the ’80s.

And now? Now it’s just gone. Ripped from my life just like that.

Two new bottles of different and untested schmutz sit on my bathroom counter as we speak. They taunt me. I hear them in the night. “It’s not the same. It’ll never be the same.”

I’m going to have to start wearing a turban.