It's the Small Things | Flakes of Chipped Paint

The black paint on my nails is chipped and peeling off. It reminds me of the paint in the verandah of my uncle’s house that mysteriously started chipping away. It was a bright orange mural, but now there is an ugly splotch of exposed concrete, barely covering the brick underneath.

Things chip away with time. Decay is inevitable, is it not? No matter how hard I try to grasp on to my youth, it slips through my fingers like fine grains of sand in an hourglass. I’m left clenching my empty fist as brittle nails lined with chipped black paint dig into the skin of my palm.

One day, I found an old play dough container in the verandah of my uncle’s house. Out of curiosity, I opened the flimsy plastic cap revealing a flaky orange powder, reminiscent of the chalk dust that stained my pinafore when I volunteered to go dust the blackboard duster back in school.

I wondered what it was for the longest time and decided to ask my niece about it. She reluctantly confessed that it was a stash of all the chipped paint from the wall. She had meticulously collected every little flake of orange paint that had crumbled on to the floor. She memorialised it, a relic of the decay that comes with the flowing sands of time. She cherished that box and all the flakes of chipped paint in it, for no seemingly logical reason.

So what if I decay? So what if my black nail paint chips away? So what if my black hair turns to a shade of chalk dust grey?

All of us have these metaphorical play dough containers filled to the brim with pieces chipped away from old friends and lovers. Whether we acknowledge it or not, these remnants cling on to us like grey chalk dust on dark pinafores. Maybe that’s enough.

Vismayi Lanka is a 25-year-old aspiring writer and a proud cat-mom who is currently on an adult gap year, searching for meaning in all the little things.

We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.

And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.

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