PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I don’t think I’ve smiled in two years. Well, I’ve smiled. The muscles have stretched my mouth across my cheeks, lifted up the slowly forming lines where my laugh sits, exposed my teeth, pinched my freckles and shown bones under the squished skin. But I haven’t smiled. Not the way people ask me too, with tactful light, with controlled joy. With a kind of passive acceptance that life is who people want to you to be or what your college degree tells you to be.

I smile when men in the street comment on my thighs, when customers I wait on ask for more water, when people I don’t know tell me my lips have an elusive curve or that I’m too smart for them. When life plays a trick on me, like happiness or goals that implode.

I smile because I’ve been directed to do so, to put on this brave in a bitter wind, in the cold of summer when I’m alone in my bed because I’m too far away to have friends or feelings. Because not smiling tells everyone who I am really, how it really is. No one likes to be reminded of that.

And they say how dare you. They say smile. And I do because the world’s finally asking me to be dishonest, and that’s all that I know to be true.