You’re always running . . . so it seems. I know you are walking, but your gait is sped up as if you’re being chased by the ghosts in your mind.
You have a smile on your face, but never smile.
Someone put it there . . . permanently. It reaches from your left cheekbone to the left corner of your mouth, and then—mimicking the exact precision of a cosmetic surgeon—starts again in the right corner of your mouth and ends at your right cheekbone; as if the cheekbones were the watchmen at the gates, “Thus far and no further.”
They told me it was retaliation; you had a big mouth, so they gave you one.
I don’t know your name, call you “Smiley” in my mind, but I don’t see it anymore, that voodoo doll cross-stitched grin; a zipper, zipped up permanently, including the opening they left where your mouth is, because you barely speak.
I smile, not knowing if you are conscious of yours.
You ask—with a dull, fearful look in your eyes—for the same two things every time you come in: a piece of paper and a pen. You sit and work for hours and always leave your work behind. One eight-and-a-half-by-eleven page scribbled full of symbols and calculations, figures and shapes, as if you were attempting to reconstruct your face, working out the measurements and incisions, the alignment of the skin and final shaping of the mouth. There are so many numbers and lines penned in layers I cannot decipher them—like the layers of your mind where I can never uncover what is underneath the surface.
Am I the only one, or you too?
When one cut you open and the other stitched you up, did all your sensibilities spill out or did they get stuffed deep inside? Have you exhausted your capacity to respond to emotion—blunted by relentless apprehension generated by your appearance?
A shadow going through the motions, a phantom.
Is this why you don’t smile, Smiley?
