Decline

This is the other one I might read. HELP ME DECIDE!!! Comments, please.



You are bald, and this realization is painful because you have always had hair, even when you were born, and it didn’t thin out at 3 weeks like other babies’ did, your mother always used to remind you, it just grew into a thick mass, and now, fifty-seven years later, you are bald.

It shouldn’t be such a shock; you have looked at yourself in the mirror every morning for years and years and for the last fifteen you have watched your hairline slowly receding and the remaining hair thinning and thought in vain that maybe it just looked thinner, until you ran your hands through it and felt it like corn silk (but not quite as soft) and then once or twice or maybe a few more times you walked back into the bedroom after shaving and asked her to feel your hair too because she wouldn’t lie to you—she loved it so much when she first met you and never grew tired of touching it, and so it must be hurting her to watch it go as well, the remaining tufts fading into a non-descript, unmemorable gray that makes you think of wizards and accountants and homeless men.

She doesn’t lie to you. She says it was bound to happen sooner or later; it happened to your father and LORD did he have a head of hair when he was young, curly and thick like an electrocuted sheep, but at forty-five it started to fall out almost as if he were a cancer patient, and the gray was so sad, his coming of age not greeted with fanfare and praise and golden trophies but with boxes of dye that he tried to hide, until one day he gave up and let it go all the way, gray to silver to the resigned white that it was just before he died. They combed and gelled it nicely at his funeral, you remembered. He would have been proud.

Yes, it was bound to happened sooner or later, but you just can’t stop thinking about it, almost an obsession, this thought of hair loss is, because it seems to you a character flaw; you should not be one of those men, those men who go bald from the stress of jobs they don’t enjoy, from the pain of living with women they don’t love—baldness is not only a sign of the descent into old age to you, but also a sign of failure, of nothing less than an absence of success despite many attempts whose sad results were this: an unhappy life and a bare shining head.

You look back into your own eyes in the mirror and it is clear now; you have reached the point of no return. From here, there is the last third or quarter of your life, which will be spend waiting for the end, and that end will be heralded by the last of the hairs on your head falling to the ground, for when your hair is no more, you, as well, will be finished.