Telogen Effluvium

Something happened—said the derm after I explained how,for weeks, my hair kept falling.He said to think back a few months.I said that my grandmother died in Augustand he said that’s not traumatic enough,I said that my father had surgery in Apriland he said that’s too long ago,but that regardless of what happened,the shedding had stopped —and I felt briefly sad at the thoughtthat what I’d just learned had begunwas already finished, and how many other thingswere beginning that I had no idea about,and then, because of blond hair and frecklesand my great-uncle having died from melanoma,he asked me to undress, stepped out,stepped back in, and how dignified it feltto be looked at like that, to be read,a record of past exposuresbecoming a map to possible futures,though I’ll only get to seethe one of them, the one I’m in nowas I walk into the harbor covepast clapboard and rusting lobster pots, out onto the spit of landwhere there stands the homeof the famed local landscape painter,built almost two centuries before,tall and crooked, made of granite,with windows positionedhaphazardly, or so I thought,until the docent shows me howeach looks out at one of the artist’sfavorite views — Sometimes he had a canvasbeside every window, and would go room to roomaccording to the light. And this onewas his favorite, she says,turning to the windowand pointing out at nothingexcept Atlantic mist roilingover the seawall, not evena dinghy in sight, and yet beyond itthe inescapable senseof the pale sun in the gray sky,its warmth delayed, almost dormant,but still all that swirling potential,a circle of it as perfectas the circle of black scabon the back of my upper calfwhere yet another bit of errant melaninhas been biopsied, and I realizeI’ve forgotten to applythe Vaseline as was instructedafter he cauterized it, afterhe sliced it off, after he said to my backin a relaxed tone — How long has this been here?