My Character

Nailswoman- nail store

She didn’t want to end up here….god; this was the last place she wanted to end up. Want ever happened to her life... She looked around the empty parlor, a soulless place were depressed middle age divorcees came to dispel their domestics to ‘couldn’t care enough’ employees.

Life was meant to be so much easier to deal with than this and smoking was the escape. This addition then spread like a parasite throughout her brain, triggering a reliance on smoking pot. Her friends were doing drugs and she didn’t disappoint them. She was even the first to start selling the stuff. Her addiction gathered steam, spreading to other forms of powdered abuse. Every night after work, she and her friends would gather at their old high school playground. They would pass a joint around and talk while dangling wildly on the swings. Fun was their motto for life and everything else was just a waste of time. In their eyes they were enlightened, they were free.

The nail parlor was her other life, a life that she despised and fought so had to suppress was becoming her life and couldn’t shake it off. It was like restricting goo that clang on her, engulfing her. The nights abusing substance were meant to rid herself from it but it seemed to get worse every time. This goo eventually became the world she had tried to fight against. She was a robot, amongst a vast army of slaves that worked miserable jobs, where the ten minute smoko break was the highlight of their existence until they contracted heart failure from the fast food that the pressure from their very jobs made them eat.

Progressively, others joined in to their nightly ritual, defying the very slots of existence that the world had prepared for them to be plugged into. The boys provided another escape, giving her a spray can and a wall. She puzzled over their eagerness to do this ‘art’. That was so primary school! Despite her doubts, she gave it a go. Her concentration overtook her misgivings. Her fluid hand movements traced the image in her minds eye. It was such a rewarding experience. The boys gathered around her, applauding her new-found talent. She truly felt at home, at peace with herself, as if she could express herself completely without anyone to listen to her. It was her and the wall. How simple was it. Life couldn’t be more beautiful than this.

Her destiny became clear after that night. Life can be so much more than loathing it every night. The restricting goo that engulfed her for years washed away in an instant, renewing her inside and out. She was a new person. The graffiti was unconventional artwork and wasn’t recognized as an artistic media. She enrolled into classes by day and expressed herself by night. She now understood that the world is full of beauty. All you had to do is take a part of it with two hands.