The Cost of a Smile

Talking about attitude, everyone should have her own share. I am not talking about the mere cognition of being you. The context is something way more aggressive. It's about the lack of any motivation to alter oneself. To believe in and worship inertia of the self.

I walk around with a poker face. You actually have to sit across a table with me, crack a ridiculous joke or two to see me smile. If you march further on polishing your sense of humor you would see me laugh. Or sometimes roar and fall of the chair. But then you wouldn't do any of that. You have no vested interests, do you. So I am never seen laughing and perceived as depressed. Or someone who walks around with a lot of attitude. I walk around with a poker face.

The slight idea of me having an attitude of any sort will make my friends laugh their bellies out. The perception of me so diamatrically opposite in my inner cirlce of friends and amongst the distant others. I am taken as some sort of a silly lost and easy going female amongst the former. I am anything but these amongst the latter I am afraid.

This realisation has been haunting me to the extent of troubling me sometimes. It's not just about me being denied a friend circle with a larger radius. It's also about the tens of people who never got the idea of what I really am. It's like denying each other a certain privilege you know. It sounds like unhealthy boasting, but grant me the liberty here. The poker face hides a lot within. When I finally talked to someone who I could have talked to long ago, I was told it's a shame we didn't converse before. But then what can we do. What can we do. With the poker face.

I do not know how to smile without a reason. Just keep that pasted on your face all the time and keep shining it at every Tom-Dick that passes by. As simple as it sounds, I just cannot do it. I mean it's a problem to an extent of being clinical. Sometimes I don't understand why I price a mere smile so much. May be I am afraid of smiling. I am afraid that it might stretch to something beyond a smile, may be a conversation between the eyes. And things would be told and taken. I do not want that to happen. I do not want to add uneccesary acquaintances. Sometimes not even the necessary ones. If that has to happen at the cost of a smile, I wouldn't even move a leg.

People ask me to change. I am told, regularly, sometimes even warned to alter my demeanour. I get to hear stories of how peoples' lives changed after they learned the art of smiling. How they get more loved, how they become more popular. More successful. Happyer. And more than anything, how they get smiled back at.

Sometimes the proposition sounds too tempting to deny oneself of. But mostly I gruntle, what the heck! It's not worth it if it comes at the cost of a smile I say.