The man had a razor near my ear and I was trying very hard to look like I wasn't worried about it. But I was.
But before I tell you that story I have to tell you the one before it. We have to go back to 2025.
2025 was the year I decided I wanted to challenge myself. I joined an NGO. I switched from freelancing alone in my room to working inside an actual organization with actual people in it. I started going on dates. I started reading again. At some point someone handed me a matcha and I didn't say no. I am still a coffee person. But I drink matcha now too and somehow both things are true at the same time.
None of it required me to become someone else. That is the part I did not expect. I kept waiting for the version of me that liked new things to replace the version that liked the old ones. It did not happen. It just got bigger. Like a room that suddenly has more furniture in it. Still the same room.
Anyway. The razor story.
My regular salon was closed. I called, no answer. I had an event the next day and I needed a haircut, so I walked 1.5km through a Colombo that had not come back yet. It was three days after Avurudu. Most of the shops were still shut. The cafes that were open had nobody in them. The city looked exactly like itself but felt like nobody was home.
I found a different salon. Sat down. The man asked what I wanted. I explained. He picked up the razor and that is when I felt it. Not panic. Just that specific discomfort of not knowing yet whether to trust the hands you are in.
He did an okay job. My lines were clean. I paid and walked back out.
The walk home is when I actually started thinking. Not about the haircut. About the fact that I was nervous at all. I spent 2025 walking into genuinely unfamiliar rooms. New people. New work. New versions of a Friday night. And I sat in that chair today like it was the first time I had ever done anything new.
I am going back to my regular salon next time. That was never a question. Ten years of someone knowing your head without explanation is not something you trade away over one okay haircut. But I walked past the new place on the way home and I knew where it was now. That is new. Yesterday I did not know it existed.
I think people stay with what they know not because they are afraid, but because what they know is usually genuinely good. The coffee is good. The regular salon is good. The same small circle of people you have had for years is good. None of that is wrong.
But there is a difference between choosing the familiar and just never leaving it because leaving never came up.
I think that is just how it works. Every new thing is its own small risk. It does not get easier because you did something harder before. You just get slightly less surprised when it turns out fine.
The city will be back by Monday. My regular salon opens tomorrow and I will go back next time without thinking twice. Nothing changed.
But I walked home today knowing one more place exists. That is a small thing. I am not sure it's nothing.
It is not a revelation at least I dont think that is. But maybe, just maybe, it is how a life gets larger.
