The Small Bare Place Behind My Ear

The morning the blow-dryer found it

I was getting ready for work in our flat in Melville, the one with the wonky geyser and the jacaranda that drops purple all over the balcony in October. It was a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesdays I go into the office early to beat the M1 traffic, and I was rushing, blow-drying my hair upside down the way I have done since I was fifteen. My mother taught me that trick. Flip your head over, aim the warm air at the roots, and you get volume without any fuss.

The nozzle passed over a spot behind my left ear and the skin there felt different. Cooler. Smoother. I stood up too fast and the room tilted a little, and I parted my hair with two fingers in front of the mirror, and there it was. A bare patch of scalp about the size of a two rand coin. Perfectly round. Perfectly smooth. No redness, no flaking, nothing. Just skin where hair used to be.

I stood there with the dryer still roaring in my hand until the heat started to burn my wrist. My first thought was that I had somehow ripped it out in my sleep. My second thought, the one that made my stomach drop, was of my father. He had been gone four months by then.

What grief does when you are not looking

My dad died in February. A heart thing, sudden, in the kitchen of the house in Pretoria where I grew up. One minute he was complaining about the price of petrol and the next my mother was screaming down the phone at me and I was driving the N1 at speeds I will not admit to, and it did not matter, because by the time I got there he was already gone.

I thought I had handled it. That is the phrase I kept using with people. I am handling it. I went back to work after ten days. I helped my mother sort his shirts into black bags for the church. I gave a reading at the memorial and my voice did not crack once, and afterwards an aunt told me how strong I was, and I felt proud of that, God help me. I thought grief was a thing you could be good at, like a subject at school.

What nobody told me is that the body keeps a separate set of books. While I was being so strong, something underneath was quietly settling the account. The doctor later used the word alopecia areata, and explained that it is the immune system getting confused and attacking the hair follicles, and that stress and shock can sometimes be the thing that tips it over. I sat in her rooms and thought, so this is where he went. Not into the ground in Pretoria. Into a coin sized circle of bare skin behind my ear.

Scarves, clever partings, and the wedding I could not stop thinking about

Here is the part I am ashamed of, and I am telling it anyway. Daniel and I were getting married in November. We had the venue booked, a place in the Magaliesberg with a view that made me cry the first time I saw it, back when crying was still about happy things. And all I could think, standing in front of that mirror, was about the photographs. About walking down the aisle with a bald spot. About my dead father not being there to walk me, and now my hair leaving too, as if my body had decided that if it could not have him it would not have anything nice either.

So I hid it. For weeks. I got very clever with partings, sweeping everything from the right side over to the left, spraying it stiff so the wind on Empire Road would not betray me. I bought scarves. Beautiful ones, silk, in rust and deep green, and I wore them to the office and told colleagues I was having a bohemian phase. I laughed when I said it. Inside I was checking that patch four, five, six times a day, in the bathroom mirror at work, in the black screen of my phone, in the rearview mirror at the Shell garage in Auckland Park. Twice I found new thinning. A smaller patch near my crown. My hairline felt like a coastline I was watching erode.

I did not tell Daniel. That was the loneliest part. We shared a bed and a bathroom and a life, and I was carrying this thing around like contraband. I would wait until he was asleep before I took the scarf off.

Telling him

He found out because he is not stupid and because you cannot hide from someone who loves you for very long. One night he came up behind me while I was brushing my teeth and moved my hair aside, gently, the way you would move a curtain, and he saw. I braced for something. Pity, or worse, disappointment. Instead he just put his hand flat over the bare spot, warm palm against my scalp, and said, oh love, how long have you been carrying this on your own.

And I broke. Properly broke, for the first time since February, sliding down the bathroom cupboard with toothpaste still in my mouth, crying in a way that was not elegant or strong at all. He sat on the tiles with me. He did not tell me it would grow back, because he did not know, and he was not going to lie to me. He just said we would figure it out together, and that he was not marrying my hair.

Going to find out what was actually happening

Once you say a thing out loud it stops being a monster and becomes a problem, and problems you can at least look at. I made an appointment. I had spent enough nights typing my symptoms into search bars and frightening myself, and I wanted to sit in front of an actual person. Daniel took the morning off and drove me to a hair clinic on the northern side of Johannesburg, and sat in the waiting room reading a fishing magazine he had no interest in, just so I would not be alone.

The visit itself was undramatic, which was oddly what I needed. Someone looked closely at my scalp under a light, asked about the timeline, asked, almost as an aside, whether anything stressful had happened this year. I said my father died. The room went quiet in a kind way. They talked me through what alopecia areata is and what it is not, and were honest that everyone's course is different and that nobody could promise me anything. When I asked about options they walked me through the general landscape of alopecia treatment without ever making it sound like a guarantee, and I appreciated that more than I can say. I had been braced for a sales pitch. I got a conversation instead.

Later, sitting in the car in the parking lot before we pulled off, I realised I had walked into one of those hair clinics expecting to be fixed and had come out simply understanding. That turned out to be the more useful thing.

What I made peace with

I would love to tell you the patch filled in overnight and I floated down the aisle with a full head of hair. I cannot, because that is not how it went and because I promised myself I would stop performing a tidy ending. Some of it came back, soft and pale at first like a baby's. Some of it took its time. I went to the wedding with a hairstyle built partly around what my head was willing to give me that month, and a scarf tucked into my going away outfit that I chose because I liked it and not because I was hiding.

What changed was not my scalp. It was my understanding that my body had grieved for me when my mind refused to. That the bare place behind my ear was not a punishment or a flaw but a kind of honesty. My father was not there in November. My hair was mostly there, and where it was not, Daniel's hand had already learned the shape of it and did not mind. I stood in the Magaliesberg with the light going gold and I let myself be exactly as I was, incomplete in a few places, still standing, still his. That was enough. It is still enough.