The Halo

Part II of Hair Practices

Before diagnosis, I had been going to the salon for over twenty years to experiment with hairstyles and colors: beachy waves in bleach blonde, a fiery red pompadour, a chin-length bob in tar black. My hair style and color were an extension of how I was feeling and always referencing some character I was creating. During quarantine, for the first time since childhood, I let it grow naturally — untouched, unprocessed, uncut — down to the middle of my back, parted down the center, until the follicles learned that direction on their own.

By the time diagnosis came, the hair was the longest it had been in years.

A quick search for salons specializing in cancer care led me to a small space on the Upper East Side, a stone's throw from Memorial Sloan Kettering and Mount Sinai East. Hair Place, it was simply called — run by a man named Andrew DiSimone, who billed himself as the hair whisperer. I pressed the buzzer, climbed a narrow staircase, and was greeted by a woman named Ana, whose ten years of working with medically-induced hair loss inspired immediate confidence.

Ana guided me into a small consultation room lined with plastic mannequin heads covered in wigs. She began describing the process of what she called harvesting — cutting tiny ponytails, close to the scalp, to be sewn into a soft cotton jersey cap. My natural hair would appear to remain in place, covered by a hat or a scarf, except at the scalp. She called the finished piece a halo.

She said: You have enough hair to do this. Not as a preference, not as a sales pitch. Simply a fact.

The day it was cut, my best friend L. photographed me standing at the corner of 68th Street and Lexington before we went inside. I am wearing a wool blend pantsuit in blue and green and yellow. Long dark wavy hair tumbling from my scalp over a black scarf, over the shoulders of the jacket, a single curl landing on the top button of my blazer. I am smiling with my mouth closed, looking directly at the lens of a friend's camera. I know I am comfortable in this moment only because I am looking into the eyes of someone who loves me. I know this is a portrait of a self that will be altered soon.

Getting dressed that morning was its own ritual — a preemptive ceremony for the journey of loss ahead.

When Ana finished, she packed my hair into a ziplock bag and labeled it. Her haircut afterward was speedy, without affection. I left looking, as I wrote in my notes that evening, like Sam Emerson from The Lost Boys. I could not stop touching my head all the way home. The weight was gone — not real weight, the hair could not have weighed more than a fraction of an ounce — but the absence registered as physical, spatial. I wanted to commit further. I wanted it all off.

That evening, in the bathroom, I emptied a bin of hair supplies onto the floor: combs, brushes, blow dryer, product, shampoo, flat iron, curling iron, scissors, clips, bobby pins. I looked at the inventory of tools accumulated over decades of maintenance and performance and packed them into a box, labeled it, stashed it in the closet. I knew these were not things I would be needing anytime soon.

My showers became two minutes long. I bypassed entire aisles in the drug store. I had, suddenly, money freed up from a budget previously allocated to hair care. I stood with an empty shopping basket wondering what would occupy the vacancy left by these now obsolete products.

Some weeks later, a friend — A. — came over to shave what remained.

We made it into a ritual. Candles, dimmed lights, incense, the sound of ambient drum from the speaker. A. wore a black mesh bodysuit and purple leather pants. I sat in a silver mesh chair, the chainmail making imprints into my shoulders. She cut what she could with scissors, then ran an electric razor over the rest. Little chunks of hair fell to the wooden floor. Between rows of dark stubble, my scalp appeared white and shocked, meeting the air for the first time. I was shorn and glassy-eyed, sinking into the metal that felt, in that moment, like armor.

I wanted this process to prepare me for war with a thing that wanted me dead.

For days after, I compulsively touched my newly exposed scalp — feeling a part of my body for the first time, the occipital ridge, the shape of a skull I had been living inside for thirty-nine years without ever fully meeting.