hands

I had this idea the other day based on the fact that my hands, more specifically my nails, look awful now. I thought about having a character who always looks perfect, whose clothing, hair, and make-up is always just so. The only give away that she is in distress, that perhaps everything is not as it should be is her hands. Once beautifully manicured, the nails glossy and even, unbearably elegant extensions of her long, slender fingers, now her nails are short, jagged from being bitten, unpolished, abrupt unexpected ends to her thin fingers, like a seemingly eloquent sentence that stops mid-thought.

I guess I'm feeling drawn to the idea of a character like I am at the moment--someone who puts on one face to the world, and whose pain is private, masked. It's one of the most difficult things I've ever endured. It's so hard to play the role of the perfect couple when inside I feel like we are falling apart so much of the time. It feels as though our lives are illusion--that the happy times are all a cover, that reality is only when I discover yet another betrayal. A part of me knows this is the stuff of good fiction--uncovering something for the reader that would normally be hidden from the world.