Strands

It was so shiny and fine it looked like a thread of the most precious silver. I held nimbly the strand of mum's fallen hair between my finger and thumb and examined it closely. The dim daylight reflected on it and the hair seemed to glow.

On the floor I often see strands of mum's hair. Sometimes, there is but a single strand, at other times, there are a few strands crisscrossing one another in random patterns on the beige tiling. I'd try to quickly kick the hairs aside to a corner, and, whenever mum is not watching, frantically try to pick up as many strands of hair as I can. Even so, there is simply too many to pick up, and the worst region is around her pillow after she wakes up in the morning. It pains me a little every time I try to pick up the strands, and wonder to myself whether hair grows quicker than it falls.

Maybe it's an utterly pathetic and pointless endeavour. But this way, however few hairs I quickly throw away, I can save mum the disappointment and hurt whenever she sees that more of her hair has fallen. She told me that she feels afraid and ashamed of her hair loss, that other people will look at her with strange eyes. Unsure whether it was meaningless words of comfort, I told her that nobody would think less of her. The monk in the mountains has no hair and nobody looks at him in a funny way, I said. On the shelf lies a bandanna that she bought recently, should that day come.

If she eventually sheds all her hair I may well do the same.