Turn The Page

When I was a child, my mother closed a metal gate on my hand. An accident, a single moment that crushed my middle finger. From that moment, my body wrote its own quiet story: the nail grew back in two layers, one resting atop the other, neither quite whole on its own.

When the top layer reaches a certain length, it folds! Curling like a page turning in a book, and breaks away. Not violently. Not all at once. Just enough to remind me it was there.

This has happened my entire life. A small, recurring fracture that never stops me. It only marks the passing of time, the shedding of what's finished, the quiet insistence to keep going. My finger remembers what happened to me, but it doesn't dwell there. It simply turns the page and moves forward, again and again, as if my body already understood what my mind took years to learn: that healing isn't the absence of the break. It's what keeps growing anyway.