Gaze not upon my hideous visage!

My nose is a different shape. Amber, who sees it more often than I do, has made no mention of it. They likely have not realized. The change must have been too gradual. I noticed six months ago when I pressed the bottom of it, and it didn't feel quite right. I'm aware that cartilage continues to grow as one ages, resulting in elders with protuberant schnozzes and ears like satellite dishes, but one never expects it to happen to one's own face.

I've noticed white hairs on my head. I could swear they were not there a month ago, though they must have been. Established dark hairs are not periodically drained of pigment. There are maybe ten, and I would pluck them, except I cannot be sure anything would grow in their places. It would not be the right color even if I did. Better to have white hair than no hair, my thin spot being the favorite topic of conversation of any student I do not regularly see. This once bothered me but it would be nonsense to care about the opinions of these boys. Why take criticism from those from whom I would never take advice? Still, I deal with my daily and likely useless spray of two chemicals that are supposed to be effective. I have several hats I like, which I wear most of the time when feasible, as a reflection or picture of my thinning scalp still shocks me. How did this happen? I have led such a kind life. My senior superlative in high school was Best Hair. Is this an ironic punishment for pride?

Amber advises me to decouple goodness and beauty. Age is not a punishment for sin. Is its outward expression not the fault of indolence and denial? If I had meditated, washed my hair less and only with approved and expensive shampoos, and cut it short in college, wouldn't I have a lush head of hair now? Isn't it my fault for not devoting my shallow puddle of money to the cause of my appearance when I was on unemployment? Or are the pills I take to balance my brain doing so at the expense of the head that covers it?

There's hair where I don't want it, which feels like an insult. If you are intent on growing, Hair, I can point you to prime real estate.

I scrutize my reflection. Is it dry skin? Insipient wrinkles? I slather coconut oil on my cheeks in the winter when Amber won't close our bedroom window in hopes of dispersing radon and volitile organic compounds, which can't be good for one's complexion.

Once these signs of aging, of senescence, begin, it seems impossible to stop them.

My eyesight is worse. I blame COVID's locking me in my home and having a job where I spend all of my prep time in a windowless room and the rest of the day in dim classrooms with close walls. My eyes don't get the exercise of focusing on distant sunny trees. Short of surgery, I'm not sure how remediable this is.

My body works well, no doubt because I have exercised daily for over a decade. Still, I monitor every injury and ache in case they become permanent. Tiny injuries, such as a scratch half the size of a pinky nail, resolve into pink skin rather than my tone, and it takes longer to do so.

Hasn't medical science just about fixed these problems by now? It seems downright rude no one has CRISPRed me into the vitality of a twenty-something, where I wasted my time and was less healthy. Why are we paying for their lab coats if I recoil from pictures of my head from the wrong angle? People do not believe I am 43 when I'm wearing a hat, which accounts for the headwear. Every time a white-haired woman calls me young man, I'm cheery. I fooled this kindly woman. Good for me.

Amber is incapable of looking at me objectively. To them, I'm only ever myself. They grant I had more hair when we met, but they only notice I have less when I draw attention to it, and it doesn't faze them. I am Thomm, their spouse, and the ravages of my age do not affect them.

last watched: Poor Things
reading: This Is How You Lose the Time War