A Smile is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Sometimes you don't know what you missed until it returns.
The woman excuses herself, pulling the shopping cart back to open the walkway. She laughs, but I cannot see her smile. The lines of her lips, the swelling of cheeks, the blushing of skin. All of it hidden by a mask. Her exposed eyes meet mine before drifting away. A gateway to the soul, but the mouth is a gateway to emotion.
I continue with my own shopping, passing person after person. Mask after mask. A sea of eyes perched on the fabric walls containing their emotions. Blocking away their feelings. Their loves and their joys and their laughters and their angers.
But that was life.
For some, that life ended upon leaving the store. Mask tossed into a car cup holder. Emotions revealing themselves under the cover of tinted windows and behind closed doors. With family and friends. With lovers and with coworkers.
For me, I lived an emotionally sterile life for nine months. For nine months I traveled the country in a camper. Work from wherever. Visiting wherever. Stopping wherever. Always with the protective covering of a mask. Always surrounded by the same. There was no family waiting. No friends across town. Just a pair of dogs, open roads, and emotional void.
And those that didn’t were in no mood to offer their happiness to the world. They went about their task of buying food or pumping gas.
A life without external emotion. Without an organic laugh. Without a smile.
I didn’t even realize it. Until it happened.
The Other Day
Near the end of my nine-month road trip, I stopped at a house. It was a famous house. Some know it as the house built over a waterfall. Others know it as Fallingwater. Frank Lloyd Wright’s most recognized work.
Masks were not required on trails for vaccinated individuals.
I walked the trail, mask-free, working my way to the house partially consumed by a Pennsylvania forest. Along the way, I passed a man. An older, Japanese man of grandfather age. Short in stature with peppered gray hair, he walked with his family. As I approached he looked at me, nodded, and smiled. Not a forced smile. One of true pleasure and happiness. One of someone glad to be outside, with family, around people, for maybe the first time. It was the kind of smile where the lines of his lips seemed to push past the boundaries of face. Large and wide and purely happy.
I nodded and smiled in return, continuing my path. My heart and mind still with the old man, the two pulled my body with the thread of invisible emotions to a stop.
That was the first smile, the very first organic, true, real smile I’d received in nine months. A smile that feeds the soul. That warms the chest and reminds the world things will be okay. A smile of laughter and joy and excitement. A smile of love. None had existed in my life for nine months. A dehydrated soul not knowing what it lacked.
Up until that point I had never thought about it. Never considered what I lacked. In this case, it wasn’t me realizing what I had until it was gone. It was me realizing what I missed when it returned.
A smile.
A simple, stupid, random, would have been given to anyone smile.
An empty heart rattled for the first time. Not because it had suddenly emptied itself of its contents. But for the first time, it had something inside of it. A penny dropped into the outreached tin can of the poor.
My eyes fogged. The realization hit harder than I could have expected. I didn’t know I even needed to expect it.
Dabbing a shirt sleeve to my eye, I cleared away the brief fog and continued. To see the house. To experience architectural beauty in the heart of a tucked-away forest.
After exploring the grounds and waiting my turn for the gift shop I went on my way. And yet, when I left, I didn’t take with me a great wonder of design or the splendor of art meets nature. What I took away with me was the penny rattle in my chest and the pure amazement of what a simple smile can bring.
Lovely piece. Typo: “shirt sleeve”.