A splinter on my touch finger.

After 3 hours of struggle I couldn’t get the splinter out, I am defeated. As I type, all the Hs and the Ys, the Us and sometimes the Js have a tingle of pain. I still don’t know exactly what it is, even after using a magnifying glass AND some heavily graduated reading glasses of a great-grandmother I was handed, like that guy that fixes Woody on Toy Story. I know it’s there because of the pain. But after prodding for a while, removing the suspected zones whole, after much digging, desecration and dactylic fracking, I can’t get it out. Ouch. That finger has a long history of bad stuff though, being the most used after all, and one can only think of the many times it was squashed with a door, or stuck, or pricked, what if it’s not a splinter, but a splinter-like pain? Is this the same splinter of half a year ago, remaining dormant, waiting for retribution like a vengeful mummy? What if it never goes away, and the flesh around regenerates and entombs it, still preserving its bothersome qualities? Ah, this is wrecking me, man.

I have only 9 functional fingers, now that the typing proved even more a pain of a pain. In a little voice in my head I complain angrily and stupidly ‘why pain so tiny thing,’ and come back to discerning. I don’t have a microscope, but I feel even with that I’ll need some subcutaneous exploration a la magic bus or something. We take for granted so many things all of the time, all of them known to go wrong. We don’t think of the skeleton we carry until we fracture a bone, or we don’t think of how good is standing until we sprain an ankle. We eat food mindlessly till a sore throat turns our aliments into shipwrecks, or we smell them only when our nose pathways are OK. Try walking with an ingrown nail, or with an acute diarrhea. Imagine being constipated on vacation, or having a headache when your favorite series drops.

It’s an absolute disgrace when you get an eyelash in your eye like a lance swimming down a curve, wet stream. When I cannot get them out I go to bed waiting for the secret mechanisms of the night to put them near the lacrimal, but, sometimes I wonder, what happens if one falls to the other side? What if behind the eye there’s just a dump with all the things that fell on it? I hate things in my eye, but this is worse. Much much worse.

I wish it were something I could pass on. I want someone to help me. It could be a version of excalibur: he who manages to get the splinter out gets to be the king of the gingerbread empire. Or it could be a love story, when someone finally takes pity on me and relieves me of my finger, and gets my heart. The funny thing is I never write, but it feels like the day I wanted I got a splinter. Haha, I want my touch finger back! What an injustice!

PD: How I wish I could still use my finger for good; push buttons, finger painting, sexy yogurt eating, shushing, pointing, tapping, typing and touching are things of the past.