As a Bellassai, I’m at the end of a long line of Italian men (and women) with body hair thicker than lush forest moss. I used to lie awake at night and wonder why we couldn’t have turned out like the oiled, hairless men in the Dolce&Gabbana ads. I’m sure they never had to shave their necks beneath the collars of their shirts, or tweeze obsessively between their eyebrows, or brush the fur on their toe knuckles. I bet their shower drains didn’t look like they were trying to flush the decaying carcass of a trampled wildebeest.

When my father took off his shirt, it looked like he’d covered himself in glue and rolled around the floor of a veterinarian’s office. I used to wonder how he ever fully dried himself off after swimming in the pool. And this is what I inherited.

My hair didn’t grow normally, though. The hair on my face didn’t all decide to arrive at once, at the same, even length. It grew one at a time, starting with one very ambitious strand that grew from the dead center of my cheek and coiled before I’d noticed it. It was long enough that a girl at school reached out and physically plucked it from my face, before she said, “Awww, look who’s becoming a man,” an event that continues to haunt me to this day, but mostly because she had no idea if maybe I wanted to keep that whisker as a souvenir or if I’d been growing it out as an experiment.

When I eventually had enough hair to shave, I pressed way too hard with the electric shaver, and had my first lesson in the searing pain of razor burn, which is just another one of hair’s backhanded gifts. Hair ushers you into adulthood, welcomes you with the new responsibilities of maturity, and then, when you finally muster the confidence to deal with it, takes a layer of your skin clean off on its way out.

•  •  •

Sometime around my twenty-second birthday was when I first realized that the hair on my head was beginning to thin. I noticed it, as you notice most things in life, in the reflection of my head on the blank screen of my phone. At first I thought it might just be the angle—nobody looks like they have much hair when they’re looking at themselves from beneath a triple chin. But when I brought up my grip, I saw that the hair at the front of my head seemed just a little less thick than usual.