to amend: rick painted my fingernails. i don’t know what it said on the bottle but to me it looks like glittery asphalt. i keep staring at them. my nails haven’t been painted since i was six and going through my girly tinkerbellproductsanddresses phase. that was back when everyone thought i was a boy (entering 2nd grade, day 1: “why are you wearing girl’s socks?”) my mom made me get my ears pierced at age eight in order to protect my ego but i developed a swift antipathy to earrings, kept losing them, and finally demanded to grow my hair long.
irony of ironies, as soon as i started to grow my hair, i no longer needed to, as other developing physical attributes made my gender painfully clear. an antipathy to being female supplanted my frustration at being mistaken for a boy. that lasted til middle skool and was thrown over in favor of a fixation on boys but at that point, and through most of high skool, i wasn’t girly enough to succeed with them. i sought refuge in females, although those relationships were far from safe, especially when boys were involved.
growing up is a cruel process. funny how a glimpse of shimmery nail polish can take you right back there.