Jay Marks's Hair

Hello, reader.

Caroline recently tasked us to write a descriptive piece about the hair of someone we love.

I chose my father. Jay Marks.

What followed was a revealing glimpse into my own 'receding' psyche.

Jay Marks’s hair.

Eighty-two strands of salt and pepper follicles stare at me dead in my tired eyes as we sit across from each other this Friday night.

Brushed meticulously with an amber comb, his father, my grandfather Nathan Marks, bequeathed him on the morning of his sixteenth birthday.

“Here, son,”

He said. Probably.

“So you can one day sweep what’s left of your lid the same way I, and my father before me, have done.”

Jay Marks’s hair.

Not quite George Best. But definitely not Diego Forlán.

The sideburns cling to his temples like Velcro on a Clark’s school shoe, reaching just below his earlobes, just enough to denote the faintest whisper of mod. Especially when paired with the ill-fitting teal Fred Perry polo shirt my sister bought him for £32.99 from TK Maxx.

Jay Marks’s hair.

I am starting to think my fixation is less about him and more about my own follicular fate.

Anyway.

Jay Marks’s hair.

The ever-spreading bald patch on the back of his head reveals an olive scalp. The rogue hairs sprouting just beneath his eyebrows, as if to mock the ones that have retreated from higher ground.

And maybe that is it.

Maybe, as I examine my own thinning barnet, the brown hairs abandoning the corners of my forehead, depleting day by day, I realise Jay Marks’s hair is not the object of my obsession.

It is a prophecy.

A silvery window into my future.

The ghost of a hairline yet to come.

A harbinger of doom.

Jay Marks’s hair.

All this said, he has always told me in his assured Lancastrian timbre,

“I never notice it’s going. And to be honest, it does not bother me. I’m not the one who has to look at the back of my head, am I?”

And maybe that is the difference between us.

He may be losing his hair.

But I’m the one losing my mind.

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