This Hair Don't Care

Rubbing the steam off the bathroom mirror, I looked at my reflection and remembered I needed to comb my hair so that it’s at least making a half-hearted pretense of all running the same way. It’s stopped growing lately, though, so that I don’t really need the comb - a quick run through with my fingers oughta’ do it. It only took one, two, three passes before it looked acceptably tame. But then, as I reached for my toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, I noticed all the hairs stuck to my hand. There were maybe a dozen or so. I looked down at the sink, and it had another dozen hairs lying there staring up at me like dead pets, and the thought blitzed through my mind: my hair is falling out, and fast.

So that happened.

That was two days ago, and since then the speed with which my hair is departing my head like the proverbial rats from a sinking ship has only accelerated. It’s as though my hairs have no confidence whatsoever in my ability to sustain this body now that it’s awash with toxins. Thanks for the vote of confidence there, hair.

And I’m reminded of this, my own hair’s treacherous betrayal, in unexpected moments throughout the day, too. Some of it is on the scroll pad of my computer this very second. Drying my head after a shower leaves our white towels covered in so much of my dark hair that I have to shake it all off into the bathtub, which only makes me notice how much of it was already lying in there. My hair falls into my cereal milk. It fell into somebody else’s mashed potatoes today, too, but I just let him think it was his own when he pulled it out because hey, I’m no saint. I leave it on my pillow when I get out of bed in the morning and on the Molly dog when I was petting her this afternoon. That one actually felt like poetic justice. Finally she had to deal with some of my hair being on her instead of the other way around. #cancerwin

Aesthetically, I don’t mind losing my hair so much. At least it’s supposed to come back this time, unlike with the usual, boring old male pattern baldness sort of hair loss. I keep telling Emily that I’m basically just temporarily transforming into Jason Statham or Vin Diesel, but I can tell by her eye rolls that, although she believes the baldness is going to be a spot-on impersonation, I may be lacking somewhere else. I feel bad for her, really. She has to look at me when I’m bald, after all, whereas I just have to avoid mirrors and employ my rather fine collection of hats.

But it’s not just that. I feel for her for the same reason I also really don’t want me to lose my hair. It’s because being bald is the hallmark of being Cancer Boy. Until now, I could still jauntily trot around in public and nobody know about any of this crap. I could still pass for normal - I wasn’t yet branded. But now, now that my hair has gone down the drain with my cereal milk, I can’t escape the label. Pretty soon cancer will be the first thing anybody thinks of when they look at me, and poor Emily has to live with that visible label walking around beside her all the time. And for her, my baldness not only labels her as Cancer Boy’s Wife but will also serve as a constant reminder of this mess we’re in.

And I don’t really know what to conclude from all of this, except that it’s a funny, old world. Sometimes you lose all your hair for a while, and that’s okay. At least I’m gonna’ make a sexy bald man from the ears up. And for just a little while longer I have a new party trick where I lick my hand and run it through my hair to show off the impressive amount of hair that comes off in that single swipe. I mean, who else can do that, right?