Hair Loss (unedited)

I consider myself Black; my mother is not.

Yet, her hair is Black, glossy, and fine. She doesn’t have to brush it. She either uses a Black comb or shakes her hair and it falls untangled to her shoulders. She would have grey (or silver as she liked to call it) hair, but she dyes it regularly “Dark & Lovely” — herself, alone in her bathroom sink not in a salon.

Black, fine, sparse hair crowned my head when I was born.

I know this fact because I saw the professional pictures strewn about my baby book and opened its baby’s first haircut envelope…