The tip of the middle finger of my right hand is sore. It feels like I’ve bitten it down to the quick, but I haven’t. Or maybe the feeling is more like having a sliver of wood or chunk of dirt jammed under the nail into the tender flesh underneath—a feeling of achy pressure with the promise of festering goodness in a day or so.
I push it with my thumb to increase the intensity of the pain—to try and pinpoint its source. I pull down the hard, dry skin bounding the nail, but nothing is revealed. No splinter. No crack exposing subcutaneous vulnerabilities below. Is it simply a hangnail?
As a chronic nail biter, hangnails are an everyday thing for me. They usually don’t hurt. Or their pain is my baseline. But this pain is downstream of the hangnail. It’s under the tip of the nail, right at the edge.
The urge to chew on it grows. But the pain is hard and tight and threatens against any aggression from my teeth. It will hurt more if I try to pry and dig at it.
I muck out the dry bits to find that eases the ache. Was it simply too much dry, dead skin creating pressure under the tip of my nail? My own body creating a foreign intrusion? Maybe. Now it seems the source has shifted to the center of the leading edge of the nail. This feeling is more like exposed quick. The intensity rises with use of the digit; increasing the pressure of pinching an object drives tender underlayers into the edge of the nail. Nerves tingle like sparklers.
The mystery is that the appearance of the fingertip does not match what I’m feeling. It should be puffy and red. It should be obvious what causes this sensation. Usually there is no mystery. If I had smashed the finger with a rock yesterday it would make more sense. Or if I had unexpectedly jammed it. But I didn’t do any of those things. I only climbed some rocks. I hardly bore down on those crimps at the crux—when my feet were smeared on whispers of edges—as I fought the sweltering air, dipping and redipping into my chalk bag for courage. Did I have most of my body weight bearing down on that fingertip for a minor eternity as I searched for something better for my left hand? It seems like it. Did I grind that borderland between hard nail and soft skin into the sand accumulated in a piss-ripple in the rock? Absolutely.
I didn’t feel the pain under my nail after that. Not as I made the final easier moves of the climb to the anchors. Not as I flaked the rope back into the rope bag. Not as my friend and I made the long but pleasant hike back out of the valley to the car. I didn’t feel pain on the drive back to town or as we circled around in the grocery store picking up a few things for supper and breakfast. I didn’t feel it when I kneaded the dough for pizza or cut up the bell pepper or spread out the basil leaves and crumbled up Italian sausage before layering the grated mozzarella over everything.
I didn’t feel it in the shower before bed or as my hands roamed over her body in the soft darkness. I didn’t feel it as sleep took me into dreams I don’t remember this morning. I didn’t feel it as I heated water for coffee or poured it over the filter into the waiting steel pot.
It was as I sat sipping the hot concoction of joe and half and half, looking bleary-eyed out the big front window into the foggy world beyond that the fingertip first spoke. Soft, but persistent. Until I couldn’t ignore it, until I had to investigate. In the quiet moment the smallest voice becomes heard.
