Yesterday morning (Sunday) I woke up deciding that I would finally be an adult and cut off all my nails. These were not just any kind of nails developed from prissy self-grooming.  No, these I had vainly nurtured and meticulously maintained with bi-weekly salon visits for the last couple years. Nails that had received much praise for their ostentatiousness, and maybe a little for my ability to keep them going, that I had prioritized so much, they became my outfit and my clothing the accessories. But as much as my ten best friends were a part of my character, they weren’t a necessity in my life. Sure they became such a center of attention every time I used my hands (which was a lot and I did have long fingers), but the difficulty of their upkeep which was once awed by witnesses started becoming a task. Simply put, the longer they grew the harder it got to completing simple everyday tasks. I could no longer button shirts, nor could I close a necklace lock, I couldn’t even use my favorite lip balm. In fact any kind of cream, lotion or gel that involved me dipping my fingers I had to stop using, lest I wanted to spend the next half hour getting it out from the crevice between my nails and fingertips. I stopped feeling inspired for new nail designs, and one day as I sat waiting for my manicure to dry I wondered what else I could be doing with the 2 ½ hours I had just spent. I told myself it was time to cut them all off, and once I heard it out loud I wasn’t the slightest bit upset. After waking up to this brief moment of epiphany I felt a sudden urge to rid my self of the excess unused clothes I had harbored for so long, starting with my sneakers. I could tell just by looking at them all laid out in their collective glory which ones would go first and which ones would stay. It was the start of a new day.

And then in that same instant that I had rejoiced myself to starting anew, I received a message on my cell from my ex-boyfriend, telling me that he had started seeing someone new and that we had to chill on the texts. What. The. Fuck. We only broke up less than a month ago. What was this shit? He was deciding the fate of our friendship by the presence of some girl? He didn’t even call her his girlfriend, just someone he started seeing. How did someone he meet 15 minutes ago get precedence over our 4-year history? And why did she get to decide that our only form of communication should stop? Texting was my only contact with him. Sure I knew where he lived, had all three of his emails, was his friend on Myspace and Facebook, but we had grown apart (during our relationship and after our break up) to the point where text messages was best for both of us. But now, that was an obsolete too. And what exactly did he mean by “chill”? I never texted anything remotely close a romantic rekindling (maybe that first week after the break up, but that was really it), nothing inappropriate in a manner that would raise suspicion or cause any alarm. Exes can still be friends, I believed, if both parties know where they stand. Where did I stand, or better yet where did I cross the line? Was there some boundary I wasn’t aware of? Texting was probably the most impersonal, un-deep way to keep it short and simple, to keep it moving. There was never really an end, because there wasn’t really a beginning. A text, though limited by 60 spaces, had no structure or length. It was the anti-conversation. So how did I go wrong? He never told me before today that he started seeing anyone so how the hell was I supposed to be aware I was interrupting anything? How did it go from you can text me anytime to someone doesn’t like that we are still communicating so we shouldn’t anymore? Was this another goodbye to add to my list?

It bothered me a lot. Not because he had moved on but that he was already settled on making sacrifices to make her happy. It had taken him 4 months to say he loved me, 8 months before I finally moved in and nearly an entire year before meeting his sister. He wanted to let me know how much he adored me but that being a doctor meant he always had to make sure every decision was balanced and paced. I had earned my place with him, and he had shown he was worthy of it. But this new behavior, it caught me off guard. It weakened my opinion of what I thought his character was. And worst, because he was my exboyfriend after all, his was a reflection of my character and it weakened what I thought of myself. I wanted to not think of it anymore so I headed on down to the nail salon. Fortunately I lived in Chinatown so the nearest one was only 4 blocks away and charged only $3 for cutting nails down. As soon as I walked in a 30-something year-old Vietnamese guy greeted me with a “Hi, hello, what can I do for you?” in a very used-car salesman way, but chipper nonetheless. He didn’t introduce himself but I wanted to name him Tony, because he just looked like a Tony. I explained that I only wanted my nails cut down and he suggested I get a polish change to make it all look cleaner. I agreed. He was already working on a another woman’s manicure, a Trinidadian lady who was getting long white square French tips, so he asked me to sit in the booth next to his and that shortly someone would be out to help me. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure I take care of you baby”, he added.  I smiled. Guys who worked the nail salons usually got the girls going with their heterosexual charm, but “Tony” added the “baby” as if he knew me his whole life and that’s what he always called me. Just then a Vietnamese woman with a burn mark on her bridge took the empty seat in front of me and began taking the old polish off. Tony kept watch through his peripheral, keeping one eye on his Trini customer, the other on my fingers, as the 4-color tiger-stripe designs that used to adorn my nails soon became washed away into a rainbow mishmash on an acetone-soaked cotton ball. “You like those crazy designs?” he asked, making eye contact with me just to make sure I knew who he was addressing without stopping the filing job he was doing on the Trinidadian woman. “If you ever want crazy designs like that, tic-tac-toe with different colors squares, anything you wanted hand-drawn on your nail, I could do it” he offered me. “Just let me know, I’ll take care of you baby”. Well it’s too late for all that I told him, but next time. He was content with my answer and went back to making small talk with the Trini lady, telling her about his own Jamaican and Trinidadian friends and how he couldn’t tell the difference between the two. His English was better than the other nailists, and therefore had mastered the art of conversing and gossiping in two languages. Every now and then he turned to the soap opera playing on the TV, say something about the character or the actor playing the character aloud in Vietnamese and then explained the plot to his attended customer. By then Burn Victim had returned (like Tony she hadn’t introduced herself, but unlike him she wasn’t friendly), had started filing my nail bed down with a rotating electric filer, the kind that looked and sounded like a dentist drill. She got a little too close to a nerve, or maybe it was the heat from the friction of the filer hitting the same spot on my nail, but I felt a sharp pain, yelled for her to stop and pulled back in reflex. Tony looked over, and he and Burn Lady exchanged words briefly in Vietnamese. Apparently she thought I was just trimming my nails short and getting a refill too, so Tony asked for permission from his Trini Lady to take care of me for a quick second.

He worked with such voracity, filing the ends of my nails down like a carpenter taking a chainsaw to unwanted wood. He was too busy making sure the motorized filer, which he now had cranked up to high speed, wouldn’t shave my fingers off that he hadn’t noticed the flying chunks of acrylic, glue and nail hitting my face and hair. I knew there wasn’t a better way to get it done efficiently, so I didn’t complain. Sure he could’ve been gentle, and hand-filed it to perfection but then I would have been there all day, and this procedure was about letting go, as quick and painless as possible. I think Tony knew that too, seeing that my real nails growth underneath nearly matched the long of their wildly colored acrylic overcoat, was now reduced to a short stubby mess. He knew when I told him just to cut, no refills, no designs, just cut them all off, this wasn’t a regular follow-up appointment, but rather the end of an old habit.

When all the nails were short I was able to make a fist. As Burn Victim manicurist came back to smooth them down with the buffer and paint them over, I became occupied thinking of all the things I’d have to relearn without my nails that I hadn’t noticed the drama unfolding next to me. Apparently Trini Lady was a con artist. She liked to come in, get her nails done, and halfway through complain about it so she wouldn’t have to pay full price. But Tony wasn’t having it this time. “Listen if you’re not gonna let me do what I wanna do, then you can go somewhere else”, he told her sternly but softly. She called his bluff, pushed her seat out, picked up her plastic bag of random stuff with her now fully tipped and painted fingernails and told him she’d never come back again. “Before you leave let me cut your nails”, he said, his hand out waiting for her to oblige. She did not. “I can cut them myself” she replied in her indistinct Island accent. That’s when Tony flipped. “Give me your fucking hand!” he scolded her. “You did this shit last time, but you not gonna get away with it, not me, I ain’t the one.” Wow, Tony had hood in him, and heart. “You ain’t gonna walk out of here with my nails” he continued. The Trini Lady was twice his size, and what Tony lacked in weight and height he had in speed. Just as Trini Lady announced she would be calling the cops, Tony urged her, go head, then lunged forward and went for her plastic bag of randoms. Standing behind the table he held them up as if to tease her, told her that now she couldn’t leave and to go ahead and call the cops. Tony was neither scared of big-boned black women nor police enforcement. Perhaps he was in a gang when he was younger, I wondered. Or perhaps he was used to this kind of thing. Trini Lady picked up her cell phone and started the conversation with the 911 operator with “Hello I’m at a Nail Salon and the guy here is going crazy, he’s asking to cut my hand, cursing at me and he took my bag and he wont let me leave.” I, like Tony, knew what the cops knew, nail salon drama doesn’t require much police back-up. Even after my third coat of polish and three pushes of the air fan dryer, no one had shown up. I left, not wanting to be a reporting witness, in case anyone did. That was the last time I was in a nail salon.

The scenario that took place in there reminded me that I should probably try to occupy my new down time with something entertaining. Responsibly entertaining I should say. Maybe it was receiving that text message from my newly pussy-whipped exboyfriend that I didn’t want those bad feelings lingering on me, I decided to get a book. Reading a book I could emerge myself further, further and deeper than watching a movie. It was a commitment, but a commitment I wasn’t afraid of. I remembered how much I loved reading when I was much younger. I had even written an essay in the 6th grade about what I would do if I won a million dollars and the nerd I was said I would buy books, nothing but books and read them all and end up smart (you believed those kinds of things when you’re in the 6th grade). You could say that didn’t help win any friends but I had my books anyway. I excelled academically and was considered for being tested as Mentally Gifted. And that was enough. That was until puberty came along, then boys, then shopping, and then finally required reading, and term papers with their technicalities and footnotes and bibliographies. And that was that. I walked a couple blocks to Borders and bought a copy of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I had been eyeing that book for some time but for reasons that I can’t remember now never got around to getting it. I had other books on my mind too, from older, established authors like Ayn Rand and Salman Rushdie. But for some reason I felt an urgency to read Oscar Wao first. Maybe it was the name, for a long time (before I Googled it) I thought Wao was Asian. And then I discovered it was Dominicano, and that the author had taken the liberty of making parts of the text in Spanish. I was intrigued, I loved reading literature that included ethnic terms because it made whatever original language the terms were from seemed too superior to be translated into whatever language the book had been written in. That was why Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka was still one of my favorite books, because for her to keep the island pidgin in its original form - even if some people didn’t recognize it as a language, even if some people considered it Hawaiian ebonics - keeping it in the text was far more important than trying to translate it into something that may or may not be its equivalent in meaning. I was excited for this new book. I was excited to learn Spanish this way. I was excited to be reading again. And then I found out it was a New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer, that was it for me. I got home, wanting the first reading in a long time to be comfortable, I took a shower first.

When I was finally all settled in, I took in the book like it was an 8-course meal that was meant to be consumed in an entire day. And boy did I love every minute of it. Footnotes about DR history read like post-it notes from your really smart but really suave Dominican friend. I finally recognized the proper spelling of pendeja, and preferred to use my fill-in-the-blank thinking to deduce Spanish words instead of stopping to look them up, for fear of losing my place (I also had dictionary ADD, and it was also severe in the 6th grade). I enjoyed seeing literature that used words like “mad” as an adverb for other adjectives in East Coast slang, reading “swagger” and “fucking” and “bitches” among SAT flash words and still feeling I was taking in real, rich literature. It was like reading a book written by a peer, and not someone dead, dying or formerly in hiding. Every now and then I’d find a quote I really liked, repeated the line over and over again so I could remember it instead of having to mark its place. An hour and a half in, I was only on Chapter 3 but I already knew this was an immaculate piece of work. Still, something was bothering me. Every time I stopped reading I kept thinking about---and his dumbass text message this morning. He fucking had the nerve to text me at 9:28am on a Sunday. It suddenly dawned on me that everything I was doing to distract myself from the anger I felt was making it worse, and whatever I was trying to enjoy would be intermittently put on hold by this looming rage. Here I was liberated from my high maintenance manicured nails and reading a motherfucking Pulitzer-prize book, and this asshole was ruining it for me.

So I put the book down and did what came naturally. I grabbed my laptop and started writing. It started with a story about a girl who once admired her independently responsible and practical exboyfriend but lost all respect for him once she realized he was a pussy for pussy. It was a release, and such a relief. I hadn’t noticed how much I had typed and how much easier it became by the 4th page. It was odd having to adjust to feeling of keyboard with my fingertips for the first time after years of methodically working out ways to type with just the tips. I had to remember that the keys my fingertips rested on were the right keys and not the one above it. I still couldn’t get around to not accidentally hitting the caps lock key when I meant to hit A, but I attributed that to having not taking typing classes. I was still mistyping Asian as Asain and space as sapce, but I was typing at much faster rate anyway, more than I had been doing for the past two years. As quickly as the words were forming in my head and mouthing out of my lips, they were transferred immediately onscreen. It felt good to see my words in front of me, no longer hidden in the silence of my thoughts but out there, for god-knows-who to read but nonetheless it was out there, out of my head, out on something tangible, out there somewhere else. I realized that by saying goodbye to one satisfying distraction, I had re-welcomed another, my writing.

Thank you, Tony, Junot and Fuckface.