Metaphor

My youth is a lot like a hangnail, in that I'm busy composing a life throughout the day, with dog tasks and running tasks and grocery tasks and wife tasks, and I look down and there it is, swelling slightly the more I notice it. Hello there, nice pink hangnail, I'll say, you don't have a place on my body, you are for children who don't yet moisturize. Adults presumably transcend these things. So I'll ignore if for awhile and snag it on my clothes or bang it on a door, and there, there it grows.

Then comes hangnail concentration: I will usurp you with my will, hangnail. Well, not really my will, that's only romantic flourish, my very own mounting of the bardic steed. No, I'll just rip you off with my other two-bit claw nails--you are so tiny it will be easy to extricate you. A shame, really, how weak you can't help but be.

But with each tiny white tear it grows and bleeds a bit and now a mound of flesh, this hand is not my hand. Puffy nail, as if I could stuff you. Loaded ring finger, how crowned you are, as if you could be loved.

Later the pinkish torn flesh will turn dark in anger--this is not how you take care of a hangnail, says the hangnail. You were the one who said moisturizer, you were the one who claimed adult.

No solid or liquid left for me to punish out, the hangnail, flat and dark, almost resembles an eye. A single dilated pupil looking back into my own. It doesn't need to say I told you so, or that violence isn't the way to go. Instead the pain blinks through it and I just stare back from inside my human, proper body. Winning through sheer magnitude is no victory at all. Hangnail remains, unvanquished, and if I were to grope for wine or Tolstoy, the hangnail knows it'd be useless--I'd still feel it and know its presence and nothing else.

Yes, my youth is a little like a hangnail.