You know your stress level is maxing out when the lady at the nail salon clicks her tongue at the sight of your cuticles. Mine were chewed to bloody bits, ragged, red and swollen. Even typing hurt my digits. Biting away at them, however, was the only way I could stay in front of the computer and keep working without pausing to scream my head off.
“I know, I did that—I get nervous,” to which she made this sound like the Nintendo Marble Madness death cry. “No! You play with your phone!” Like, instead? Regardless.
This diffused a little bomb inside me. I don’t know what it is about the nail salon—as industrious and fast and heads-down and in the middle of a strip mall, like the one I go to is—but I get this heady feeling that everything is going to be ok. It’s one of the only times being surrounded by women acts as some sort of anxiety equalizer for me. (Usually it’s the opposite.)
[The weather was so so spectacular—low 70s, sunny, clear—that Rob and I unexpectedly camped on this patio on Cary Street with our bikes and had way too many beers for a Sunday night. It was heaven.]
[Saturday night, we strolled to My Noodle for a seat at the bar and some Spicy Lemon Chicken, and I put my head on Rob’s shoulder and we soaked up the sort of weird atmosphere there and watched Guy Fieri on mute on the television and I sorta had the feeling I didn’t need to be anywhere else in the world.]
[All that’s missing from this photo is a sound file of the cicadas on loop. An iconic Fan evening.]
[Friday morning meeting, work-from-home-style.]
Maybe it’s the dropped walls between perfect strangers, physical and figurative: her holding my hands, exasperated when I can’t keep my fingers still in the UV light, massaging my shoulders, our faces inches apart. Two hustlas, two whining iPhones, my moneymakers in her moneymakers. It gives me a strange sense of hope.
This is all, of course, excluding the bad and the ugly of the equation, because as chill as getting your cuticles ripped off is, some meanies and genuinely appalling human specimens do manage to roll into that joint. As long as I tune them out, though, it’s just me and the tut-tut lady and there aren’t many things keeping me from leaning over the table and giving her a hug.
-C.
[Deets for the cheap seats: Free People t-shirt dress + Rails LA Carter star shirt + MinkPink castaway romper + Rag & Bone hat and dagger scarf.]
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