This week I’ve had three notable experiences with fingernails.
My first was at a soft play centre with my son. I unthinkingly ripped one of my half-broken nails off with my teeth, then had nowhere to put it. There were no bins, and I couldn’t drop it on the floor lest a soft-footed toddler impale themselves. And so I put it in the pocket of my jeans. I’ve worn these jeans a few times since, and every time I put my hand in my pocket I felt the hard arc of it, a sharp crescent moon. There never seems to be anywhere to dispose of the nail, when I remember to, and so it remains there now.
The second was on the train. I looked down and saw a huge nail clipping on the ledge beside the seat. It might have been a toenail, or from a very large thumb. I was horrified, appalled; sick with misanthropy.
Once, I bought a McDonalds, then took it on the tram to eat at home. The milkshake sweated through the paper, tearing through and spilling everywhere. The man across from me held his head in his hands as if it were the most depressing thing he had ever seen. I had a magazine in my bag and I tried desperately to scrape the spilt milkshake onto it, with my bare hands on the filthy tram floor. “There’s nothing you can do,” the man said. “People will get on and see it, and think ‘what dickhead did that?’. And today, that dickhead is you.”
And so I was being unfair, I think.
The third fingernail was the most surprising. I was wearing a bodysuit beneath a blouse, and felt something catching just above my stomach. I assumed it was a stray piece of a plastic tagging, then fished it out from between my breasts; hoping nobody in the busy bar I was in had noticed. When I removed it, I found it was not a tag, but a tiny fingernail, obviously my son’s. It was a nice fingernail to find, as fingernails go, but I do not know how it got there.
My own fingernails are perpetually decrepit and disgusting. I bite the skin around them until it bleeds. I paint them once in a blue moon, then let the paint chip off for weeks after. They are all different shapes and lengths, always broken or torn. I do my best to keep them clean but I am only human.
The state of my horrible nails is a running joke in my family; a family composed entirely of women, and factually no men. I am generally quite a vain person; fastidious when it comes to grooming. But the remit of my pride doesn’t quite reach the tips of my fingers, which are only getting worse, are actually borderline offensive. They are quite a good indication of my mental state, and right now they are bitten and sore, chipped and claw-like. Yet as I write this I am wearing a full face of makeup. My hair is in a “snatched bun” I had to watch an Instagram tutorial for. I’m wearing a silly little outfit, though I am just sitting and writing at home. I don’t know why I can’t extend this reach of care by just a couple more inches. But then, I quite like this fraying at the edges of myself. A dry cleaned coat, the hem caked and frayed, from being dragged through something disgusting. An atrophying little tell.