Smile Emoji

Our stories keep pain and ooze experiential knowledge. It’s tragic. Everyone’s got it in uneven doses. Some can etch it, ink it, type-set it. Some breathe it in, and keep it quiet. Some trauma share because the pain is normal. I once read a story about a man on a pirate ship. It turns out the person who wrote it, had never set foot on one. You could tell. You could feel it in the words. The next time I read a story about a pirate, he was real, you could tell, he knew his pirate shit-seven- seas and all.

It makes me angry sometimes. I read stories about people, all confessions of hurt, of sadness set free on pages. It roams around all raw with no character to hide behind. I’ve read so many diaries. They say it’s harder to write humour. Maybe there isn’t as much of it to go around. I once read a story about a girl who disappeared, but she was real, you could tell. She knew what it was like to leave and come back.

Let’s get silly. Break free of this spell. But the broken world makes it hard. I get it. I work at an art gallery, and it’s the same. I once met an artist who crumpled up a series of red papers with hand drawn smile emojis. He laid them out on the hardwood floor, simple medium, his mental health encapsulated in a pile of dead pages.

I must confess, I dislike how shitty it looks sometimes, and despise how easy it is to recognize. Everyone is burdened with their own heartbreak, sickness, and death. What tragic weight, the human condition. They tell us. But, tragedies meet resilience . The devastating wars on pages, repressed memories, at the bar with a stranger, the story teller, the walking corpse, a cold dead spirit, plagued by existential dread, the past, the regret, the longing, somehow meets peace and a new beginning. I once read a story with Hope, it was real you could tell..