prompt: shield, title: the best defense in misc. flash fiction

I’ve been trying to grow my fingernails out again, for what feels like the ten-thousandth time in my forty-something decades on this rock, and I’m certain that I’m going to fail once again but I keep on trying anyway. I don’t just bite them, you know. Oh God, if were just as uncomplicated as that. While my rhetorical styling may trick you into thinking my idiosyncrasies are charming hipster affections spun like fresh candy-floss at a summer’s fair to both horrify and delight, I’m going to level with you here, I’m less a functional adult human and more ten-thousand neuroses crammed together into a trench-coat in hopes of gaining attendance to an R-rated film. I’m nuts.

These weird organic sharp things at the end of my fingies are supposed to be protection against infection, my mom would always tell me as a kid, a shield against the germs that could ride up your cuticles into your blood and stop your heart right there. Growing up with a Nurse Mom is one hell of a ride. The potential of death less a distant obstacle, more God’s April Fools’ prank.

But, again, I do not just bite them. I am a simmering pressure-cooker of obsessive-compulsive disorders, but it’s not an oral fixation thing. The reptile portion of my brain say they shouldn’t be, and woe be to any semi-sharpened surface when my autonomic nervous system decides its time to shear some keratin build-up off my tips. Scissors, the metal bit that holds erasers at the ass-end of pencils, the thin plastic facing at the lip of slipshod office furnishings, anything will do for the instinctual flinch that screams ‘I SEE WHITE ON THAT NAIL! ABOMINATION!’

I don’t even remember how it started, though I dimly remember picking up from the television that long nails weren’t masculine and I believe that is all my anxiety brain needed to whip it up into a lifelong disorder. Biochemistry is so beautiful. It can turn any loose idea into A Problem.

But it doesn’t matter where these things come from inside us, in the end. We are stuck with our nail-biting and our hair-twirling and our merciless deconstruction of the disposable coffee cups and whatever other tics or peccadillos our genes and our upbringings lace into these very souls.
Knowing rarely changes anything, sadly. If anything, knowing makes you just feel even worse, because now you know you should’ve known better before, Catholic Stream of Consciousness.

I guess that all I’m saying is, I’m trying to grow out my fingernails again for a forty-thousandth time, but my body can’t remember how hard to scratch when it actually has fingernails and I am just scratching the hell out of my arms. I just need you all to know that, no, the scars all over my limbs are not some skin conditions. I have not taken up intra-venous drugs. I simply don’t know how to have fingernails. I’m just normal crazy is all. Which might be even worse.