The area in question is relatively small. Two by one centimeters to be exact. About the size of two shirt buttons set side-by-side.

It is comprised of matter that is common and plain, making it, by itself, common and plain. But its location, its placement, makes this otherwise ordinary area different, noticeable, fixating. But in a bad way. It stands out. Something about it doesn’t fit. Makes it look huge and weird. Yet it sits right where it is supposed to sit – where it always has – doing what it is supposed to do, no more out of position than a bar on Lackawanna Avenue. Something about this area is off-putting though; as much as a trailer park would be popping up in Aurora Heights. Something about it is ugly.

At least that’s what a fancy hairdresser told me (in so many words) recently while she gave me what amounted to a $27 High and Tight (had never been to her before; left arm went numb when I heard the price; recovered; asked if I could have my hair back). My unibrow was the area in question, the one she was dogging. More specifically my unibridge, that rugged wisp, two-buttons wide, connecting the hairy ridgelines above the eyes to form a continental divide – the unibrow proper – across the face. She said I should wax mine. That it would bring out my eyes. Just Nair it away, she says. This woman clearly underestimated the importance of the patch.

The unibrow, I explained to her, would be staying. Not only because it was good enough for many of my great-great aunts and those who figured out how to make fire (all tough, resourceful people), making it good enough for me, but also because it is a marker; the marker defining where modernity took over and the wild days of an earlier people left off. It is a trace of the past, when a menacing forehead was all anybody had. Cavemen used theirs to scare off attacking woolly mammoths and as a source of kindling when winters were severe. Later on, the first women on the volcanic islands off of Italy, my ancestors, used them to scare their husbands into taking care of the yard. When the men of those same islands furrowed theirs, it made them look extra sorry when they got in trouble and extra stupid when they tried to BS their way out of it. The unibrow’s uses were (are) universal, and often indicated (indicate) that someone meant (means) business.