Every so often, I pull myself together enough to stop biting my nails. When I left Providence this February, my fingers were in shreds, but a weekend of planning and then three days of moving back to my parents' place kept them away from my mouth as an absentminded exercise in cold turkey.
Tonight, I covered the old orange polish with blackish purple in thick, shiny layers. My brother has told me that I have the tiniest fingers and fingernails he's ever seen; comparing them to the hands of others--even women smaller than me, even my own mother--I've found that it is true. They are tiny, and surprisingly so for someone as tall as me.
How often do we think about these unassuming, slavishly functional body parts? Do we judge them? In biting and not biting and painting and so on, I can exert some form of control over my fingernails, but I don't know if I have the capacity to judge beauty or ugliness in a fingertip, a wrist, a heel. Why change these things? And what makes a breast or a belly any different?
Tonight, I covered the old orange polish with blackish purple in thick, shiny layers. My brother has told me that I have the tiniest fingers and fingernails he's ever seen; comparing them to the hands of others--even women smaller than me, even my own mother--I've found that it is true. They are tiny, and surprisingly so for someone as tall as me.
How often do we think about these unassuming, slavishly functional body parts? Do we judge them? In biting and not biting and painting and so on, I can exert some form of control over my fingernails, but I don't know if I have the capacity to judge beauty or ugliness in a fingertip, a wrist, a heel. Why change these things? And what makes a breast or a belly any different?
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i bite my fingernails too. beauty is who you are not what you look like.