Nails - A503
numbered cigarettes as a concept will mark my thoughts, developing into prose as a weekly post on substack.
I washed my hands 10 times today. Typing on my work laptop reminded me about how much I hate dirt getting underneath my nails. oh and it especially, doesn’t look particularly powerful or professional while smoking a cigarette.
Throughout 2023, I have different colour nails. blue marble ones to ward off the evil eye. rainbow ones for little me to feel seen. black pointy ones for ‘i’ll skin you alive’. red ones for erotic behaviour. hailey beiber ones to pseudo launch my modelling career. green ones as an offering to the god in everything. Personas just having a fun time- what really felt like a privileged kind of a survival mechanism.
100 dollars later, I take my guilt to my front porch and sit at court, with a packet of chesterfield golds. unemployed. I pull out a cig, take a hit, the cigarette is numbered - A503. life and my own thoughts seem like a manufactured simulation. clouds are overcast around the housing commission building, looking down, laughing almost, at my self created chaos. why did you leave everything? mocking at me. shame.
confronted. trauma olympics press play, as if pain is shaped like a measuring stick? Aren’t comparisons of who’s got it worse or who’s got it better, just another version of ego formulating a hierarchy? a structure of how to be fucking grateful. My father used to say some people have the short end of the stick and others are born lucky, as if it were that fucking simple.
There is always this line. the thick solid binary, either expressed in a pros/cons list or a slightly better version, a venn diagram which includes the middle part similarities - we see, we smell, we touch, we taste, we see, we feel. breathe. the dirt under my nails, makes me uncomfortable because without those acrylic nails, I am completely transparent.
My writing is dedicated to: the women who couldn’t leave, the women who left. the women who are still deciding. the poster from inside my window glares at me, women, life, freedom.. yallah what are you really doing about it?