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[ 5 minute read ]
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Her mouth moves up
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I have a neighbour that has a really cute smile. She doesn’t smile often, at least not at me. But, like most women, if I smile at her she smiles back. Maybe a psychologist would say she doesn’t want to give me the wrong signal. I have never really understood why smiling is the wrong signal. No, I tell a lie; I had a girlfriend that many men found alluringly attractive. She, maybe because she is Columbian, smiled a lot. It turns out she was a lot of men’s temporary girlfriend for an hour or two. Yeah, okay, I understand that a woman’s smile aimed at a man might be construed / misconstrued as ‘Would you like me to be your temporary girlfriend?’
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My neighbour lives next door and we sometimes talk, mostly about plants and trees. We are mature like that. She sometimes gossips a bit and I try not to.
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I had hurt my knee and had trouble getting my bicycle out of my front door. It goes in forward and comes out backwards and needs to be turned around without touching the ground as it comes out to avoid the plants. This meant that I had to take all my own weight and the bike’s weight on my soggy knee and rotate one hundred and eighty degrees. I can normally do this in one because human bodies can be facing a different direction to the direction the feet are facing, but it does mean twisting our knees a bit.
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‘Urgh! Urgh! Aahh!’ I panted quite a bit too ‘Pant, Pant’, because I also had Atrial Fibrillation (the heart doesn’t beat as it should or misses beats) caused by too much caffeine and too much stress. Mine goes away and I only rarely get it. This urgh and pant went on down the garden path until I reached the road, where I carefully got on my bike from the elevated position of the pavement. Now, most of my weight is on the bike saddle and the movement of my knee will not include any twisting. Much less pain.
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I started to ride and THEN I noticed my neighbour in her garden; she had been hidden by her hedge a bit, and my own inability to recognise the presence of other people being around. That was a temporary issue because I am ‘blessed’ with hyper-vigilance. Most people with PTSD are cursed with it; that’s what makes them jumpy, I think. After decades of it, I have somewhat turned it into a super-power. Okay, a power. Well, maybe an AA battery power. It is actually pretty binary in how it manifests – super-aware and not shockable, or jumping out of my skin.
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‘Hello, Sally!’ I cheerfully called.
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She had heard me huffing and puffing and oohing, aahing, and ughing before I got on my bike, and then noticed me calmly cycling past her like a magnificent, tall and handsome swan in human form. I am like that. She plainly thought that I had been aware of her and had pretended to be in pain or out of breath. She turned her head towards me, away from her bird feeder, and smiled her wonderful smile. This one said, ‘You had me fooled, you rascal.’ Thinking about it as I cycled on, I wondered what she might do if I dropped down dead in front of her. That would be a real shame because I would miss her smiling at me. So later, I told her I was not acting; you know, not ‘crying wolf’. She just looked confused. It was a couple of days later and I don’t figure in her life as a memorable entity, so I think she had forgotten my act / actual pain.
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I am unusual in that most things I come across are not particularly interesting to me. I have a ruthless streak and use it on myself. I will deny myself practically anything for the sake of the tiniest cause; most of the time the cause is driven by how can I be more lazy or how can I reduce spending money. They don’t always segue together well. Take cycling instead of catching a bus or driving, for example.
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Advertising and marketing have absolutely zero effect on me. I mean zero. I even studied marketing to find out why, but I am none the wiser from solely that. So I studied mental health and there, by extrapolating stuff and making my own recipe I came up with a passable understanding of myself. And it is only today thinking about Sally’s smile, that I understand why photographers of clothing models make the models mould their bodies into certain shapes while they click away.
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If I was a photographer and Sally was a model, I would trick her and then reveal the trick to her. She would squint a little and that smile would move her cheeks a bit, more than Mona Lisa’s, her mouth would move up a bit, and I would be able to ‘see’ Sally thinking, ‘Sneaky.’
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So now, I can recognise three smiles, the smile that says ‘Sneaky’ the Duchenne smile (genuine and reaches the eyes) and the ‘Pan Am’ smile (false for customers and cameras); four if I count my Colombian ex-girlfriend’s smile that says. ‘Want to have fun?’ I can’t help thinking that, HER smile is just a natural smile and European men, surprised by it, think it means, ‘Let’s do it’. I know SHE never turned it off because she once said to me. ‘If it happens, it happens.’ It’s a good attitude but it didn’t really make me happy. Young, carefree and heading for complication, but she felt good from the male attention.
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I wonder if there is a smile that just says, ‘Good Morning, keep walking and forget about me.’