The Scarifying
And then one day he wakes up and realizes he is forty years old and still chews his fingernails, and this thought seems to pierce something deep in his chest. Lungspeared or gutshot, the air seems to seep out of him.
He catches himself doing it, of course. The catching of himself is an essential part of the dreamy process, the necksnap return to full alertness, the headshake. He catches himself lowering his hands and looking at his fingers in the speckled half light through the windshield on the long drive home. Stopped at an intersection, he tells himself, This is it, no more. Even tucks one hand under his thigh to restrain himself, physically. Then finds his hand at his mouth before the light goes green. Picking and scratching with incisors and canines like some dough-eyed mental patient inhabiting a body not fully his own.
His grandmother hovers around him, within him, when he catches himself. Cigarettes. Compulsion. Addiction. But also her withered hands and their bulbous root system of veins.
He tells himself that his finger chewing taps in to some kind of cosmic equation. Collectively his fingers are a fleshy moonscape pocked by years of distraction and anxiety, states of ghost brain, even happiness. He is often very happy as he unknowingly gnaws away. Enamelled meteors crashing and colliding in random patterns. The red thrill of a cuticle torn to the quick. Etched in his ravaged cuticles is some timeless balance of cellular destruction and regeneration. Something grand and important, no, cosmic is the right word, writ very small.
This is, he knows, his body’s most innate posture. This is his primal state of repose. Hand to mouth, teeth quietly gnashing away. There is something so wholly genuine and unpretentious about this reflex that he feels a sad little stab of pride. A physical attitude that is assumed for no one’s benefit, not even his own. He does not shape himself this way to impress or feign or threaten. It is, perhaps, a radical form of self-reflection: self-consumption.
But forty? Goddamn.
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