faking it

a short story on being practical, likable, and simulated smiles

image by Miriam Marlene Waldner sourced via Pinterest

There is nothing more inconsequential than the document open on your computer screen. The thing that you give your eight hours to, here in the cloud with your name attached to it, has very little impact on the real world.

However, you remind yourself, it is what gives you access to the real world. Yes, that’s it, this is your path to the real world. You have to monitor these numbers and categorize them into reports, and then you are able to afford your apartment. Then you can save for vacation, for medical emergencies, for nights when you drink too much and spend all your money out dancing.

It is this great looming threat that keeps you at your desk. Without it, where would you be sat right now? Somewhere else on the great, green earth. Perhaps in the water. Weaving through a flower market. Lying in a field.

Let yourself dream, but don’t let yourself slip from the task at hand. The task must be performed well, and you must be convincing. You’ve been training all your life to be good at it, anyway. You know how to fake it.

The first time you faked it you were just a little kid, instructed by older relatives to hug older relatives and smile like you missed them very much. You were always taught to be kind.

Sometimes being kind meant letting someone else have the thing you wanted, even when you wanted it very badly, because it’s best to be seen as self-sacrificing. You learn it feels good to go without. You learn how to share.

Kindness can distort itself though. It, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Is it kinder to lie, or tell the truth? Who is it kind to? These are the questions that keep you up at night. At your last gasps of life you hope to be remembered as someone who cared about others, but you’re not quite sure you know how to care about yourself.

When you’re feeling daring, you let yourself think about the things you really want. It’s a scandalous taste on your tongue when you use that word want. Often you keep the things you want very tightly packed, somewhere in the back of your mind in a small blue box, and you hope that one day someone will guess what they are and present them to you.

In the coolest midnight hours want will creep up your windowsill and sit and stare at you. You are the one that called out to it, but you refuse to let it in. It’s ugly and dark and full of wishes that might not come true. These are the times when you think to yourself: why wasn’t I made as perfect as everyone else?

Other people seem to have tamed their want. You see it on their faces, this bumptious complexion that tells the world ‘I am content and I am calm’. You are quite certain that you have never once exuded that grace. You are quite certain that you, every inch of you, looks as frantic as your heart feels.

You look at the world and you see people who know how to be, but really they just know how to act. The rest of the world is faking it just like you. There are painfully stretched grins across faces that hope and pray you won’t see behind it.

You leave your house and walk out into that world and meet one of these faces for coffee.

The face asks, “How’s everything going?”

And you reply brightly that everything is good.

The face looks ecstatic for you. This face is one that you’ve known for so long, you have no reason to believe it was secretly hoping you were doing worse.

Sometimes you find that you fake it with friends more than you do with strangers.

You confess something secret to a woman in line for the bathroom and she looks at you with these eyes— have you seen eyes like this on anyone not in line for the bathroom before? This type of person only seems to spawn in the in between, before one thing and after something else.

The eyes only find you when you’ve had too much to drink and stand in partial darkness, but they always see you so well.

Sunday runs into Monday and you punish yourself for wasting another weekend thinking instead of changing. You only feel like yourself when you’re becoming someone else. You wish you could slightly alter your brain, but also your skin. Your hair. The way your clothes stretch across your body.

Is it shallow to want that? You do wonder. There isn’t time to do much more of that though, as you slump back to your desk.

You follow up and circle back and wish everyone the BEST in your email signature. It suddenly occurs to you that you have not been outside since before the sun was up, and you spend your lunch on a bench in the sun.

If your brain wasn’t calculating equations and forecasting trends maybe it would do something spectacular. You didn’t grow up wanting to calculate those equations, did you? What was it that you wanted first— before anyone showed you that it would be more foolish to try. Maybe a doctor, or a ballerina. You check the messages on your phone and return to your desk.

On the train ride home you enter a contract with the man to your right and vow to ignore that his elbow is pressing into your rib. It would be rude to ask him to please move. The car sways, and with it your bodies, until it almost feels like you’re dancing. When he gets off at the next stop you feel the absence in your abdomen and wonder if other people feel this alone when they’re in public.

You spend the night with your boyfriend and remember you’re not alone after all. Some nights in his bed feel like the sun is beaming down on you, and others are more of a faint glow, like the light shining out from under his bedroom door.

Tonight is somewhere in between, you decide, like a flashlight blinking in the darkness.

His arm over you weighs your body down to the mattress and you are grateful it holds you in place, does not allow you to expand and extend. Your mind can quiet here in a way it can’t at home.

When he kisses you goodbye in the morning you wonder if you believe in soulmates. Wouldn’t you like anyone very much if they kissed you goodbye?

You run through a list of men in your mind and imagine them kissing you in that same soft way, just to see if it elicits the same kind of warmth. The man from the subway crosses your mind and you decide the game is childish and gather your things.

One supposes it’s a good thing, that many things might make you happy, if happy is indeed what you are right now. What is happiness, anyway? Safety and security? In that case, you are happier than most people who have ever walked the earth.

Deeper down: Is it familiarity? Is it truth? These things you’re less sure about. You know how to look happy. You know how to dress happy, and kiss happy, and post happy to your Instagram story.

Someone at some time said that you have to fake confidence to feel it. It stands to reason the same applies here.

As you step out onto the street, a new morning breaks open like an egg. You can feel it pull the freckles from your skin.

This, you decide, is what happiness must be. Nothing but a new day ahead.

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xo, Julianna