I am losing my hair.
Not enough to be interesting.
I am not bald.
I am simply experiencing
a slow administrative reduction
in the population above my eyebrows.
There are still plenty of them.
That is how I know this is serious.
If they were all gone,
I could at least call it something.
Baldness.
A condition. A noun.
A problem with paperwork.
But this is thinning.
A verb.
Something happening
while I am trying to get somewhere else.
Every morning I find them.
On the pillow.
In the sink.
Caught in the collar of yesterday's shirt.
They have started turning up in places
where I don't remember inviting them.
I pick them out and throw them away.
Sometimes I count.
Not because
I expect the number to tell me anything.
Because counting
makes disappearance look measurable.
I have always been surprisingly calm around statistics.
It is the ones still attached to me that bother me.
They are thinner now.
Some of them have become so fine
that I have to tilt my head under the bathroom light
to confirm they are still hair.
A few look like nature's way of saying, "technically, still hair".
I have changed shampoos.
I have read articles
by men with suspiciously full heads of hair
telling me not to worry.
I worried.
Quietly. With citations.
But the more I watched the hair disappear,
the more, a question began bothering me.
Which one was the last?
Not the last hair I will ever have.
That is easy.
I can probably predict
the general direction of this negotiation.
I mean the last good one.
The last thick one.
The last one
that belonged to the version of my head
I never thought I would have to miss.
There must have been one.
It fell somewhere.
A pillow. A drain.
My shoulder.
The back of a black shirt.
Maybe I brushed it away without looking.
Maybe I was late for work.
Maybe I was thinking about money.
Maybe I was in love.
Maybe I was miserable.
Maybe I was happy.
It doesn't matter.
I didn't know.
That is the part I cannot forgive.
Not the hair.
The ignorance.
We imagine endings as events.
A door closing.
A train leaving.
Someone saying “I think we should talk.”
A final kiss.
A final photograph.
A final breath.
We like our endings with subtitles.
But most things do not leave like that.
They thin. That is all.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing anyone would interrupt dinner for.
Just less.
Then less again.
Then one day you look at the thing
you have been looking at your entire life
and discover
you no longer remember when it was whole.
That frightens me more than death.
Death has the decency to arrive with its name tag.
This is worse.
This is a disappearance
that asks you to keep calling it present.
So I have started looking at my hair
like an idiot.
Not checking whether I am bald.
Checking whether I am still me.
As though the answer
might be hiding between two strands.
As though one of them might still remember
the exact shape of my head
before everything started becoming less.
And sometimes I catch myself
searching old photographs.
Not for my face. For the hair.
There it is. Thicker. Stupider.
Completely unaware
that one day
I would enlarge the photograph
to inspect it like evidence.
Look at that.
Look how much I had.
Look how little I knew.
That is the real cruelty.
You never know which ordinary thing is about to become a memory.
You don't know which morning will be the last morning you get to have without knowing it.
You don't know.
Because if you did,
you would behave differently.
You would look longer.
Listen harder.
Stay five more minutes.
You would understand
that ordinary
is not the opposite of precious.
It is how precious things usually leave.
Quietly. Without announcement. Without witnesses.
Without giving you the smallest courtesy of knowing you should remember.
And perhaps that is why
I keep thinking about that last good hair.
I want to know where it fell.
I want to know whether I noticed.
I want to know whether I touched it.
I want to know whether,
for one stupid second,
I held the last piece of something
I would spend years trying to keep
and threw it away.
I will never know.
Because the last hair did not know it was the last hair.
And I did not know I was losing it.
We keep waiting for goodbyes to become visible.
They never do.
One day something is still here.
The next day it isn't.
And somewhere between those two days
you were supposed to notice.
I didn't.
I am still not bald.
There is still hair on my head.
There is still time.
There are still people I can call.
Still rooms I can return to.
Still things I can say.
Which is why, tomorrow morning,
I will probably stand in the bathroom
and complain about the hair in the sink.
I will pick it up.
Count it.
Throw it away.
And never once ask
whether I am holding the last thing
I will ever get to lose
without knowing
I was saying goodbye.
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