I still can't be entirely sure it's happening. In front of certain mirrors, in certain lighting, I can still convince myself that my head of hair is as full as it's ever been. It's only when I dare to lift my bangs at an angle that I see the peak steadily creeping up my scalp. And no matter how high I remember this peak being, when I dare to think about it, it seems higher still when I bring myself to look at it a second time.
But then again, I tell myself, the peak has always been high. Looking back at old photographs of myself, I realize all over again that I have simply always had a weirdly large forehead. My post-collegiate receding hairline may actually all be in my imagination.
Whether the line is actually retreating, and the peak growing taller, or not, though (and I refuse to measure it; better not to know), I can tell you that the first thing I check whenever I look at a weather report for my midwestern town is not whether it is going to rain today—but what is the speed of the wind. I am possessed by a fear that high winds are somehow incrementally contributing to my hair loss—wresting away a few more strands each time I step outdoors.
A friend tells me this is nuts. He points out that the force exerted on my hair each time I go under the shower nozzle must be greater than any outside air. And he may have point. But I also think he may be underestimating the strength of midwestern winds.
This same friend also tells me I should stop obsessing over whether my hair is actually receding or not and just get started on one of those medications designed to treat it. Then, at least, I would have peace of mind (in theory).
But I resist. The medications change more than just your hairline, after all—they address the issue of male pattern baldness by partially suppressing testosterone. And since my whole fear of hair loss is that it represents change, the problem is hardly helped by introducing some other alteration to my chemistry.
After all, in the end, it is not actually about the hair. It's about what the hair represents. Just as the child in the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins referenced at the outset is not really grieving for the trees losing their leaves. "It is Margaret" she "mourns for." And so too, it is not my hair I am missing. It is me.
The gradual loss of hair is, after all, just a metaphor for the gradual loss of everything else—the slide toward dissolution and entropy of the individual human body as we age and eventually die. It is the descent, as Hopkins's poem compares it, into the autumn of human life, just as the loss of leaves on a tree represents the autumn of plant life.
Shakespeare, likewise, in one of his Sonnets, compares his future bald self to an "unleaved" tree. He pictures himself as a kind of autumn oak: "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."
W.D. Snograss, in his iconic early collection of poetry, Heart's Needle, is moved to the same comparison. He writes of himself in one of the famous "confessional" verses as a college professor going to seed. The hair loss is representative of his larger dissolution. "The trees and I will soon be bare./ The trees have more than I to spare."
The comparison keeps thrusting itself on the poets: as the trees go, so go I. Hair loss = leaf loss = mortality.
And so, it is not really the bare ruin'd choirs of my scalp that I am grieving for, when I lift my bangs and search close to see if that dreaded peak has grown yet again since the last time I checked; or when I check the weather before I leave my apartment in fear of high winds. It is myself that I fear losing. It is Joshua I mourn for.
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