There’s no word for the gesture in English. Running my fingers through my hair. That doesn’t quite capture it. Perhaps there’s the perfect phrase in German, some great compound word that ends in a haft or a schlung: Lifting-up-one’s-hair-und-letting-it-cascade-through-one’s-fingers-schaft.

Do other parts of the body speak to one another as publicly yet intimately as the fingers and the hair? The hair cascades and dances as you run. But it will not twirl, Medusa-like, on its own. Imagine the specter of a woman running, her hair twirling as if twisted by invisible fingers—