A smile, it’s a simple thing really. You give them away all the time. Everyone smiles, even when you aren’t sure why you’re smiling, you do it anyway. It’s habitual. It’s natural.
I pass a friend of mine, Jessica, every morning on my way through the freezing tundra to the Main on the Scattergood campus. She smiles at me, and I smile at her.
“Good morning.” She always says
“Good morning.” I always reply, even when, in fact. it is not a good morning at all.
Little did I know that behind that smile, she was holding back tears. Later, I learned the fight with her boyfriend. All she wanted to do was curl up under the safeguard of her brown and white covers. All she wanted was to crawl back into bed and watch television on Netflix until some staff member forces her to out of bed. She doesn’t tell me this. She just smiles.
Every morning, Emma is mopping the floor in the Main. It’s her crew assignment. We all have one. Staff and students.
“Good morning.” She smiles even as she mops out figure eights on the floor.
“Good morning.” I say, stomping me feet so as not to track snow on her floor.
But it was not a good morning for Emma. She had found out the night before that one of her best friends from her old school had taken his mother’s pistol out from its hiding place in their linen closet and shot himself through the head. Emma was grieving, not able to process this alone, but not willing to tell me, or anyone else that she was having trouble, so she smiled, never imagining anyone would have the audacity to question what lay underneath her grin.
As I walk down the stairs to the breakfast hall I find my friend Karenina standing there, presumably waiting for me, a letter in her hands.
“Good morning.” I say, linking arms with her as we walk into the crowded breakfast room.
“Good morning.” She says, smiling at me with her lips closed, showing off to me her berry-blast lipstick that is an obnoxious shade of bright purple.
It was three days later that I would find out that letter she had been holding had come from Yale. “Unfortunately we cannot accept all who apply…..” She didn’t tell me this. She just smiled.
This is just a morning in an everyday life. People hide behind their smiles, not wanting others to know their upset and trying to trick themselves into believing that it is in fact a good morning, and they are in fact feeling perfectly fine. Smiles are misleading—especially the overzealous one. Too often when we pass, so does the smile. It fades a disheartening frown, or a devilish glare, something that society would never accept in public. This is why you should always ask yourself, what may lie underneath those pearly whites, while giving everyone else what they want from you, a smile that lets them know that everything is right, and then to go back to their lives living happily, in a never ending state of denial.