I think I finally look like me again.
Not the same me I was before. That me has excruciatingly rectangular glasses and hasn't quite figured out that she can smile with her teeth and probably nobody will notice the gap between them. She has hair that is the same almost-black but it falls in tangles halfway down her back and if you told her to cut it she'd laugh at you. She doesn't care about her appearance because she's never needed to. Maybe she doesn't carry herself particularly elegantly or own a pair of shoes to go with every outfit but that's okay because she knows who she is. Her skin fits her like a glove.
The dermatologist called it alopecia areata but I know differently now. My hair can see the future. It got a glimmer of the cancer diagnosis a year down the line, and decided it wasn't worth sticking around. Humans aren't supposed to shed their skins. Our warm blood gets cold without its protective shell. Mine made me a chameleon, blending into the background just enough to not be noticed. I didn't know how to be visible, didn't know the right expression to pull when eyes lingered at the little bit of skin-coloured netting where my face met my wig. The hairs on the shower floor and between my fingers and clinging to my clothes like a plague all felt like little bits of the person I used to be. Who knew my sense of self could be lost like so many strands of keratin?
A thought I distinctly remember thinking: lighten up, at least you don't have cancer.
There is some anecdotal evidence linking alopecia areata and early stage Hodgkin's lymphoma. My initial oncologist (there have been a lot, it's a special bonus of being a difficult patient) said he thought the lymphoma was advanced enough that it had been lurking up to a year before it was diagnosed. Maybe my hair can't see the future at all, maybe it could just see deeper inside my body than I could, could see the badly formed lymphocytes quietly proliferating months before they made themselves louder. Maybe my shed chameleon skin was trying to tell me it was time to look below the surface. It was trying to give me a way in.
A succession of wigs, like a theatre wardrobe, each one a different character. Even ones which should have been perfect had a synthetic shimmer, like a computer-generated avatar. Hairlines too neat, a drawing by a child coloured with only one brown pencil, a shade slightly too orange. So nearly right that the things that were wrong were magnified to one hundred times their size. Uncanny Valley. Who's that in the mirror? I'm not sure I know her. An Instagram feed cluttered with selfies because maybe I'll recognise the next one. No, I still don't know who that is.
Five months into chemo I took the wigs off. The bald patches had been surreptitiously filling themselves in, while the rest of my head thinned itself out under the influence of the regimented poisoning, leading to a pathetic kind of uniformity. The raggedness evened up with a barely-there pixie cut, but the wispiness didn't matter because I didn't really look like myself at all any more anyway.
A quote I distinctly remember from a coffee date with a childhood friend: You're looking great!
I was wearing jeans which had always been a little bit too small but I'd kept because I liked the colour. I couldn't really sit down in them. Except that now I could. Months of systematic poisoning will make you shed more than just hair. I found edges I didn't know I could have, bones protruding in places where they had always hidden in a cloud of flesh. I was still a normal weight, but this wasn't normal, not for me, someone who was used to being so soft and solid. The large-eyed girl in the mirror looked like she might break into a thousand pieces in a moment. My mum made envious comments about the circumference of my thighs and I scowled because the only alternative was crying. Contract a life-threatening cancer and you too can have this waistline!
I longed for my old skin, the one that held all my parts together without any effort, the one that was so comfortable I could forget it was there.
Soon it wasn't enough to pick off all my flaking scales, there was further to go. First a tube in my upper arm, then one just below my right shoulder, burrowing into my veins and slowly turning me inside out. Another hard corner I wasn't used to, another way I had to be aware of all my newly raw edges. One of these tubes was fitted badly, the end protruding a little too far into one of the chambers of my heart, the perfect place for a blood clot to form. Six months of blood-thinning injections into my stomach, six months of gathering together little pouches of skin to give the needle somewhere to go, six months of stinging and bruising and staring at my midriff more than I ever had in my life.
Every time it felt like I was beginning to scale the walls of this new flesh fortress, something changed and I was back on the ground, lost in a house that had been built around me, with no floor plan to show me the way out.
A comparison I distinctly remember: Your hair looks like a forcefield!
Almost two years ago, my hair started growing again. First, an almost invisible fuzz, the first membrane that would become a new skin for my shivering heart. I still looked like a Cancer Patient for a long time, a parade of haircuts that were all slightly too short or slightly too awkward to be intentional, the slow fade of scars both inside and out, the gradual filling out of my figure into its old curves and lines and pillows.
A year ago, I got a second piercing in my ears. I asked my consultant before I did it because I didn't know how much of a risk it was, and I remember how light my heart felt when he said I could. I am wearing studs shaped like tiny elephants now, a herd of two recolonising this old wasteland. I hope this body never again forgets who it belongs to.
Now, the only thing betraying that process of deconstruction and rebuilding is the small, bumpy scar just below my right collarbone, but it's not a reminder of fragility any more. It's a reminder that I'm still here and I'm still me, somehow, after all that. At the start of this year I had the first haircut I've had in over four years that didn't feel like making the best of a bad job. The way my hair slopes upwards from the nape of my neck, the place it parts at my forehead, the little wisps that fall in front of my ears: these are all things I chose, and things I would choose again even if I had all the hair in the world to choose from. The me I see in the mirror looks back at me with a steady gaze. Her skin isn't as feather-light as it was when she was seventeen and heedless, but it holds her mending heart with gentler hands.
I'd like to be her friend.
