I was still young when my grandmother got cancer. Too young, even, to really grasp the concept of cancer to a certain degree. Everyone talked sedately about a body turning on itself, but I as a pre-teen going on to teenage girl, my body was already betraying me in every way imaginable. Bodies are slippery things.
When I first discovered the clumps of hair all over the shower, I thought it was my own. I asked over dinner that night if it were possible for someone my age, hypothetically, to get grey hairs. My mother looked at my grandmother briefly and dismissed it awkwardly.
My grandmother sighed and admitted it was her hair, and that she had been losing it due to the chemotherapy. I told her she should be more careful about not leaving her hair everywhere in the shower, since it was pretty gross, and I certainly didn't want to have to be the person to clean it up. She laughed and said she'd try harder.
It wasn't much use, I guess, because the hair didn't really go away so much as accumulate in greater quantities on the walls, in the drain, on the curtain, behind the conditioner bottles. I had given up on the bar of soap for liquid soap.
It finally got to be too much for me and I confronted her again about it, and after a moment, she confessed to me that she was actually remembering things with each hair that fell out, plastering it to the curtains and walls like unwound cursive narratives.
Bullshit, grandma.
You don't believe me. The far wall is dedicated to faces I've remembered.
That's still gross.
But I looked the next time I took a shower, and strangely enough, I thought I did see something or a second on the wall, scrawled in hair. I couldn't make anything of it, but there looked like a certain order to it.
Unnerved, I splashed it off the wall with some water.
Over the next few days, weeks, months, I started to see letters, then words and finally, faces. I started to think that I had gone crazy myself, and that my eyes had started to betray me like my thighs.
I kept it to myself.
And then one day, I swore I saw my own face on the far wall, and couldn't help but ask my grandmother about it.
It's the day you were born, honey.
But I didn't look like that when I was born!
People aren't always born on their birthdays. I remember when you swam into the deep end of the rec center pool for the first time. You were born as a new person the second you pulled yourself out of the water that day.
Whatever grandma.
When she died a few months afterwards, it hit me harder than I had thought it would. I skipped school for a week and a half.
I finally shaved my head in solidarity and went back to class to take a math quiz I had missed. It was last period, and I went home again right afterwards.
You would think that the whole experience would have made me better about my own self-diagnosis, but I never adhered to much my entire life: diets, going to the gym, learning the guitar. The body is a slippery thing.
Cancer set up camp in my left breast last month sometime, and I'm not really sure what's going to happen from here on out. Maybe they'll have to carve out a piece of my body, like a sacrifice to itself. I'm supposed to start chemo next week, though.
I started thinking about my grandmother again, and her hair all over the shower. Who knows if she really wrote stories on the walls, or if she was just leaning her head against it in exhaustion and resignation. She certainly made no show of it, and convinced me until the end that she was going to make it, that she was going to finally write down all those stories she had been pasting onto the shower walls.
I thought about my own $140 haircut, and the tales it would unwind into, as I started losing my own hair. I hoped they'd be as strong as whatever stories my grandmother was writing in her head at the time.
Instead, I bought a razor and shaved my head that night, shearing the Gorgonic snakes from my scalp, and any petrifying power they still had over me.
