Goddess, I Am.

And so dewy Iris flew down from the sky on saffron-colored wings, trailing a thousand different colors across the sun… - From Virgil’s Aeneid

My hair is phenomenal. Oh, it’s not because it’s pretty and shiny. You won’t be seeing me in a shampoo advert anytime soon. No, my hair is phenomenal mainly because it never seems to run out.

Allow me to explain. My hair falls for no reason. In fact, ‘fall’ is an understatement. My hair literally drops. In clumps. With roots. I would run a hand through my mane or brush it, and end up holding what looks like a dead rat. I estimate that I probably lose about 300-400 full strands every day. Slob that I am, I used to just ignore them when I was still living alone until they sort of gather in one corner, looking like a discarded toupee. Obviously, I can’t do the same now that the boyfriend and I live together. The poor man has tried sweeping and mopping them away, but they still turn up in weird places such as his amplifier and the freezer. He spends at least 20 minutes a day on his hands and knees picking up the ones that didn’t get entangled with the broom one by one. So do I sometimes, but the general upkeep of floors is mainly his responsibility. And before you think I’m a lazy cow, I have my own responsibilities, too, such as doing the laundry.

But I digress. Disposal is an issue. Putting them in with the rest of the rubbish in bins doesn’t work because they somehow escape and scatter with the slightest hint of a breeze. The most effective method, we found, is to throw them into the toilet. That way, they get wet and heavy and don’t blow off. They can be easily flushed away, never to be seen again - something that my mother strongly warned me against. Still, convenience won over sense, so a’dumping in the toilet we went.

That is, until we woke up yesterday with a clogged toilet. After the boyfriend’s hard pumping (it’s not that kind of pumping) and a hell of a lot of those toilet ‘declogging’ liquid things, our toilet is now working normally again. Of course, my hair is the main suspect, though there’s no way of proving that for sure. So just to be on the safe side, I’ve taken to dumping my hair over the balcony with the romantic idea that the wind will blow the strands away to a better place. I suspect our downstairs neighbor is suffering for it.

Of course, I’m very much afraid that I’m going prematurely bald. But after having my scalp repeatedly inspected by anybody brave enough to do so, it seems like I don’t have alopecia, or any other hair loss conditions. And because I have full strands dropping off with the telltale roots, it’s obviously not brittle hair breaking mid-strand. It’s like I’m an overproducing hair mill.

Maybe I should look at donating my hair to charity, or better yet, make a fortune out of selling wigs. Or maybe, I could use the strands in knitting. Hairy socks, anyone?