The smile; I can’t find a better mechanism to get closer to people, to create a deep and sincere connection. It’s lovely to see one back, that warm rush of emotion through your whole body, knowing that you’re being reciprocated.
I love being able to establish conversations quickly, to see how people unfold in front of you when they feel that they are safe by your side, it is like a kind of dance, that as you perfect it you can feel that you dominate the dance floor, as their body language loosens up, you start to see how they turn all their attention towards you.
The smile is my weapon of choice par excellence. We’ve found a subtle way to show off the handful of sharp spikes that have helped us eat everything that walks in our wonderful world.
For me, smiling is more than expressing how I feel, it’s emanating what I consider my essence, it’s showing that I am here for you.
Smiling is wonderful, try it when you have the torches lit when the witch hunt has started, at the moment when your mind burns in flames with hate.
Nothing like being absorbed in your thoughts when walking down the street and meeting someone you know. Strike up a casual conversation and smile calmly while avoiding remembering that your mind was wandering between thoughts of suicide, hunger, and that strange mole that recently appeared on your left shoulder.
You must smile when you see an empty shell in the mirror, full of lies, grudges, and resentments. When your reproaches invade your world, in which you feel that nothing in you makes the slightest sense, that is the perfect time to build the arch of happiness.
It’s fascinating to me how I can easily talk about building a better future while daydreaming, how my face warms from the flow of blood, my eyes narrow and laughter is so close to the surface. At that moment I could say that I am more alive than ever, so alive that I forget that I am dead, that nothing matters to me because nothing makes sense.
My life has been full of surprises and unexpected moments, of changes along the way that have taken me to unexpected places. I feel that I could tell thousands of stories and make them a tale of unforgettable adventures, it would be my saga in which you would see me recalling each part of the journey with emotion and the occasional joke to lighten the narration.
If you sat next to me to tell you my story, you would see how I draw the path of a character as accurately as his witness. You would see me with a big smile, which is the hook for you to walk by my side along a path full of editions and censorship, in which you would not know that behind that narration there is a gray world, with suffering buried at the bottom of a moat, that there is loneliness, abandonment, and abuse.
In a perfect world that smile would not exist, that smile would be a massive burden, in a perfect world I would not need to laugh to hide that I am as vulnerable as the child who was cornered and threatened while innocence vanished through tears and knowing that there was no one save me from that damn moment. In a perfect world, my smile would be real; in a perfect world, none of this would have happened.
The smile is welcoming, it is the fast track to bring two hearts closer. It is a blaze of affection and a shield that helps hide how heavy it is for me to continue, how difficult it is not to be able to shout to the world that I hated my grandmother and that I still hold that resentment for my mother for leaving me alone more than once, that the worst years of my life were spent between books and music to hide from the rejection that resulted from living among strangers.
That’s why I love to smile because I can be myself, a me I don’t believe in, which is an invention to protect what little remains after looting. I smile to remind myself that the world is more than something bad, that there is life and love in the corners that you least imagine; I smile to tell myself that I must continue raising the wall that protects me from invasions into my inner world, I smile to turn that sample of my teeth into a firewall in a flammable forest.
I feel a little naked now that you know my secret to happiness, that smiling is more than a gesture, it’s a prison, it’s a lie and a truth shouted in silence. The smile in front of the mirror reminds me that I still have a long way to go, so I try to take care of my teeth and continue showing them calmly with each smile. We will see what the outcome of this story will be and I hope to be alive to tell it, I hope to fill you with emotion and that you smile with me as if it were a spring of joy, I want my smile to be as contagious as yawning, that you know that it is a welcome to keep you out of my world. Smile!
“Laugh, and the world will laugh with you, cry and you will cry alone.” Oldboy (2003), from director Park Chan-Wook.