written in the strand ◉

researchers found that you can track the history of lead exposure across decades just by analyzing human hair — strand by strand, year by year, the drop after leaded gasoline was banned is right there, measurable, undeniable. and what gets me isn’t the science, it’s the idea that your body was keeping receipts the whole time. every policy debate, every industry lobbyist saying the evidence wasn’t conclusive enough, every year of delay — recorded quietly in the keratin of people who had no idea they were carrying the proof. there’s something almost unbearable about that. the evidence was always there, growing silently out of people’s heads, while the arguments about whether it existed played out in boardrooms. makes me think about what else we’re recording right now without knowing it. what some future study will pull out of us and hold up and say, look, it was in them the whole time.