Claws
On Ferarri reds and nail girlies
Once a month, I climb up the stairs of a perfectly ordinary building and enter someone else’s world. It’s white, bright, soft. Music is always playing. Sometimes it’s Céline Dion. When it’s Christmas, it’s crooners. On a Friday, it’s early naughts club classics.
From where I sit, I see the seasons change. Neighbours make coffee or come home just in time for dinner. They put Christmas lights up and eventually take them down. The city hums and buzzes.
This world smells like acetone and nail glue and polish and UV lamps. In this world, I flick through hundreds of artificial colours on artificial nails and try to pick my flavour of the month from Kelly greens and banana yellows and Ferrari reds.
And we talk. We talk for hours. We talk about A-list celebrities. We talk about Botox. We talk gym routines and share recipes.
Big things happen when I sit in that world.
She paints an orchid on my middle finger and I negotiate a salary for a new job. We celebrate together. Sometimes our universes collide and we gossip about the people we have in common: who moved to Milan, who we saw at the club, whose drug issues have gotten out of hand, what we thought of the fashion event we both attended.
Sometimes we sit in silence for an hour. She works to perfect a flame, a flower, a meticulously shaped chrome star. I sit in awe of her concentration and perfectionism. When she’s unhappy, she wipes it all with a strong chemical. And we start all over again.
When her work is done, I step back into my world carrying traces of her steady focus, her imagination, her delicate flowers or speckles of chrome dust. Her life quietly influences mine when I go through mine—claws out.