Have you ever cut one of your fingernails too short?
That’s what it feels like.
It doesn’t hurt all the time. It’s not a constant kind of thing that sits in the front of your mind every second of everyday.
Then it’ll happen. You might bump into something or notice something that gets to you, right where it burns. From there you can try all you want but you won’t be able to forget it. You’re going to have this little bug in the corner of your mind that’s going to whisper in the background of any song that’s playing, any sight you see, and every thought you think. It’ll just repeat the same two words over and over: hurt finger.
That sounds dramatic, but it’s not necessarily as bad as it seems.
Imagine you’re a billion-dollar musical with a cast of dozens and dozens and dozens of actors. Now one of these actors, not even a main actor but just one of the dancers in the back row, is slightly worse than the others. Whether they just aren’t as expressive as the others on stage or they don’t seem to have the choreography completely memorized like the other performers or they react to things a quarter-beat behind everyone else. They’re off. The musical isn’t ruined for you, but whenever you aren’t focusing, you find yourself staring directly at that one mediocre actor.
After attention is drawn to it, you’re gonna be hyper-focused on anything that touches your finger for the next couple of hours.
Now you just have to sit with it. It can’t take over your life because this is already something that you’ve dealt with for so long, plus it’s not as if this is just exclusive to you. It’s not as if you’re the only one in the world with problems, and a stingy finger is a lot less troubling than a bullet wound. You know that you shouldn’t care but the problem is that you’re going to be constantly reminded of the fact that you do care, despite your best efforts. So your brain pushes you through, and you keep going through your day but every five minutes or so, you catch yourself running the edge of your finger up and down the side of your jeans.
You have this vision of yourself. That’s the worst thing. It’s always yourself. You have no one to blame but yourself as you watch them in front of you. You are the one to blame and if you had the chance to just know then what I know now, then everything would just be so goddamn easier. Why did you cut my nails so short? If you just took more time being actually present then I wouldn’t be sitting here stuck with spite and a sore finger.