it began to fall

It is raining quite heavily outside. Since Melbourne has been plunged into a drought a few years ago the sound of rain is not as familiar and it therefore has quite a punctuated presence.

I love the rain. It is soothing and confining. It's syncopated rhythms speak of hot chocolates and cuddles.

My hair began to fall out on Wednesday the 14th of May. Not in great torrents but just subtly, suggestion its imminent departure from my scalp with a few strands clutched in an incredulous fist. I stared at the hair intertwined within my fingers and realised the great symbolism a few strands now held. So many times you brush off hair from your coat, the back of your chair or where it has awkwardly crept inside the crevice of an un- shut mouth with so little importance, a mere formality of being part of the mammalian species. But now the hairs as they descend during the day from my scalp to my daily life carry weight, meaning and an increasing baldness.

It is not a word I have been familiar with and to this day never believed I would be. Baldness is associated with middle aged men with comb overs or young people with new aged comb overs, a shaved head. It is a sign of bad genetics and a few gags over a couple of beers of the ever receding hair line of my relatives and friends is about all I believed would be my narrative around baldness. I awoke on Thursday and then again on friday to see a scattering of 'too many' hairs on my pillow. Not the 'hair on the barbers floor' amount but enough to be a visible sign that it was falling.

My friend told me of a film he had been working on in Brisbane which was about interviewing women and there connection to their hair. The connection being one of a sexual and aesthetical connection to their feminity, how they would feel if they shaved their heads. The director/narrator of the film eventually shaved her lusturous hair in the mirror whilst crying, her obvious distress apparent. I hadn't thought much about my connection to the dark matter sewn into my scalp. Whether it would change they way I felt about my body, my aesthetic and for that matter my connection to my femininity. I hold the belief that my sexuality and understanding of self is very much embroiled in who I am and how I carry myself, not necessarily the external package. But am I just allowing my first year uni feminist critique of the objectification of women and societal's unhealthy obsession and fixation of 'femininity' and 'beauty' to cloud my understanding of how I actually feel. How it feels to know that for the next 6 or so months I will perhaps not have any hair at all on my head, eyebrows and eyelashes.

that I won't have a thick sweeping fringe to hide behind but the ever present constant of head ware.........

One thing is for sure, I need more room in my closet for the debris of hats and head scarfs, doo rags and 50's styled head accessories that are creeping out of my built in robes onto the floor.

The nurses informed me it would be unlikely I would still have much hair by my third chemo, with three days until the fateful day I am feeling pretty confident, I may even say cocky that I still have quite a substantial 'Melbourne smith street asymmetrical black do' to parade around in the chemo lab.