Apocope

Apocope (a-pok’-o-pe): Omitting a letter or syllable at the end of a word. A kind of metaplasm.

I’m in trouble. It’s my babe. It’s my hair. I can’t sleep. My brain goin’ jangle— like a radiator heating up in the morning. Maybe “clank” is a better approximation of my brain’s sound. It’s not my head, but I swear other people can hear it. They look at me and cock their heads, like dogs do when they think they hear something. Of course, my brain’s clanking is there to make a single irrevocable point: My girlfriend left me. I’m going bald. I think that’s why she left me.

Toward the end she’d pick up my fallen hairs from the floor. She would roll a hair between her fingers and say “Hair today, gone tomorrow.” Or, “Ridin’ that train, high on Rogaine.” “Hair is not the play for you.” Then there’s the jokes: “I first noticed I was going bald when it took longer and longer to wash my face.”

I should’ve see it coming. She was beyond cruel. I don’t know why I stuck around as long as I did. I think I was in this thing called denial. I’m not an expert on denial, but I think it means you deny things. I denied everything about her. For two lost years, I denied that she was too beautiful to have a relationship with a balding boring accountant. I denied she was too smart for me. She is an aeronautical engineer and designed ballistic missiles for the government. Her largest feat is a missile that can hit a person in the eye from 20,000 miles away. I couldn’t even make a wastepaper basket basket with a crumpled up piece of paper from 2 feet away.

I’ve thought about committing Harry Carry— I’m trying to put a cheerful face on leaving this incarnation by punning. But my puns stink.

My x-girlfriend just called! She wants to get together and brainstorm because things are getting “pretty hairy” at work. She showed up around nine.

I answered the door and there she was. She pulled a rag out of her jacket and started polishing my head. At that point I came to the conclusion that she was a sadist. She started crying, and she pulled a toupee out of her pocket. She very carefully positioned it on my head and gave me big romantic kiss and told me she loved me. She told me when we first met she was neither “hair nor there.” But, since we’ve been separated she has “trimmed” her ambivalence down to nothing. She is sure it’s love.

I’m not so sure. I don’t understand her, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ll see where it goes. In the meantime, we’ll “curl” up on the couch and watch another episode of “The Brady Bunch.”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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