Growing

Reggie hadn’t clipped his fingernails in a long while. It had probably been almost two months since he last cut them and now they were obnoxiously long. He was starting to consider the length of his fingernails and an indicator as to the extent his heartbroken laziness had now extended. He was just too sad to cut his own fingernails.

She’d left him three months ago after some silly fight about the size of a certain actresses’ breasts and how he thought they were nice breasts to which she got angry at him for not thinking about her breasts. Or at least that was what Reggie thought the argument was about. He didn’t mean to say that he thought that actress had nice breasts; he thought that he was agreeing with her that they were indeed nice. Sadly, it was a trap that he walked right into.

So after hours of arguing about every little thing, where he put his shoes, why she couldn’t put her toothbrush in a certain spot in the holder, why he always wanted to stay in on Friday nights, on and on for hours until she finally said that she’d had enough of his unmotivated butt and she left. She went to her friend’s house and then at some point during the following week she came back, picked up her things, tossed her key on the dining room table and walked out. Reggie hadn’t seen or heard from her since.

So he hadn’t moved much from the couch they had bought together. He just sat or lay on it just watching TV and occasionally going to the convenience store near-by to get excessive amounts of junk food and cigarettes. At least he could work from home, so for a few hours at least he was able to take his mind off the whole thing. But once he was done the fact that she was really gone would creep back into his mind. He knew it was so typical. So break-up boring, but he was compelled to sit and wonder why that actress with the nice breasts ever even had to come on the TV. If that commercial had never come on would his girlfriend still be with him? Would she still be pestering him about when they were going to plan their summer vacation to South America? Why did the universe seem to function in this way? There didn’t seem to be anything random about it.

Reggie looked at his ever growing fingernails and remembered that he’d heard once that the fingernails continue to grow even after a person is dead. He certainly felt dead. He looked it too. When he did manage to motivate himself to take a shower he’d look at himself in the mirror. He didn’t see the youthful go getter that had initially swept Carolyn off her feet. He saw the ragged body of a man beat down by the stresses of the world and the emotional devastation of his strict upbringing.  He looked like the pale corpse of a man that had once lived but had passed too soon.

He’d talk to himself about his state. He’d insist that he wasn’t being lazy, but he was in mourning for the loss of his true love, the death of his love; his true emotional passing into heartbroken oblivion. He’d say these things to himself and wonder why of all the things he’d had to go through in his life, this was the most painful. 

Reggie reached up and scratched his nose.

“Ow”, he shouted.

His long finger nail had cut him. He touched his nose and looked at his finger and saw the thin line of blood. He got off the couch and went to the bathroom mirror and saw the slice on the right side of his nose. A small cut, slowly oozing blood. Reggie looked at his reflection in the mirror and sighed. He opened the medicine cabinet and looked for the nail clippers.