I remember what it was like to frown or simply glance outside my doorstep, and to feel 10,000 miles away from home.

I remember in Atlanta what it was like to smile.... and yet to simultaneously feel surrounded by thousands of strangers' smiles all at once, absorbed by too many a smile, as if at the wrong time, as if in a reactionary way, as if those smiles were meant to be real, as if those smiles were just supposed to be there, to be present, but in fact, despite, and maybe because of all of their extreme presence, were not real at all. Most often due to a latent behavioral adaptation. Mostly a representation and embodiment of what we were, just simply, taught. Those smiles that ultimately became second nature, as a father might have looked at his little girl's frown at Sunday church service and told her to just simply "turn it around" to show "the good man upstairs" her Sunday "best."

Those smiles that I was born to love, and came to fear. I mean, it's home to me. As alien as I felt in many a way growing up down south, I also grew up smiling. On the other hand and quite simultaneously, I grew up somewhat alienated by my sexuality in a society that smiled while the alien in me, the alien that I was in this society, really did not want to smile at all.

I remember what it was like to smile 10,000 miles away from home, and through the process to have learned more in a minute than I might have learned in a day somewhere else. The memory will never escape me, of many a wintry day in Russia, to smile at a stranger on the street, to learn more about how kindness can come in passing a pedestrian who might stare uncomfortable at your smile, while simultaneously proving kindness's presence as it reveals itself perhaps in the act of an unfamiliar woman telling me to quickly pull my hood over my head to protect me from the cold before she promptly continued on her way. I felt what it was to be reminded that my preconceptions must make room for other vastly different perceptions of something as small as a smile. Here was the chance to eat a bit more away at the edges of my own ethnocentrism, or my conceptions of the world based merely on how I grew up, what I was used to, the chance to employ one of the first things we were taught in our anthropology classes; that in order to understand the world and maybe even myself, I must step outside of the world I know, I must leave myself. This was where I learned that a smile, and it's reception by various cultures and populations, is not a small thing. Rather in looking past its superficiality, we can see the perceptions and receptions of a smile as puzzle pieces of whole other worlds different from our own, and in that knowledge come to discover, if only a slight metaphor, of the beauty of our plethora of diverse conceptions, as well as the pain and torture of some. Both, mind you, are so important.

I remember and know what it was, is, and hopefully won't always be like to smile or frown outside my doorstep and 10,000 miles away from home and to feel immediately ridiculed by the surrounding environment's preconceptions of my smile, or lack thereof. To be judged as to what kind of a woman I am, from my earlier days of being called "too aggressive" due to my "boyish" manner and lack of expected smiley flirtatiousness with my male classmates, to my current age where I feel prompted to pull my cheeks upward in innately learned efforts to ensure my exhaustion doesn't come across my face as aggressively directed at someone else and reveal me as someone who others might call that dreaded b-word that men seem to so often confidently feel the right to claim as theirs to speak. I hate what it means to be asked why I am not smiling, and to think "but I didn't even realize that I wasn't?" or "But this is just my face?" or "But are you even reading the same news I am?" or "Aren't you just as upset at the demises of our world, and if you are then won't you understand that it might be quite so normal to feel so upset that it just might be ok for me, for us, for anyone to NOT smile? For a second?"

A smile may at times seem superficial, but I believe the very fact that the presence or absence of such a small superficial thing, is a metaphor, a symbol if you will. A smaller symbol for all those things-an appearance, a "look," the mere presence of someone that offends someone else for no reason other than the offended person's hatred-- has been used to ridicule someone past their outward presence down to attempts to invalidate their right to safely walk down the street at night. The smile is a smaller symbol of a bigger problem, a reminder to us that judgments of the superficial are weapons used to attack that which is greater-human lives. The appearance is a means by which those with hate in their hearts, or those blinded by a system perpetuating said hate, who feel either threatened or angry, those who feel it as their "right" to rob the safety of an individual, to steal the life of a young man because of his skin and hood, to steal the safety of a woman's night, or day, after she simply decides she doesn't want to give that stranger a smile, to steal the life of a trans woman because she stepped out of her house to go to the grocery store. It is evident of how inclined our world is to hold perceptions to be of the utmost importance when it comes to a person's viability. And sometimes it starts with just the superficiality of a smile. A thing on the surface of a whole whirlpool family of other, sometimes much more violent and dangerous judgments of character based on gender, race, sexuality, identity, and more. Think about it. We were only talking about a smile here. A small superficial expression, an outlier on the surface of this whirlpool of systemic brutal judgments, and we already see the violence explode. Don't believe me? Go take a gander at the logs of women and girls, transgender individuals, women of color who have either been ridiculed, violated or murdered... murdered simply for being, for existing, maybe even for smiling or refusing a smile.

The smile is a good metaphor for the lengths systemic power and abuse that is allowed have gone to undermining humanity's existence.

One of the first times I didn't smile up north, I realized another aspect of my vulnerability by the judgment of a stranger: "You should smile!" That I can still be ridiculed for my choice to express my own emotions as a woman no matter where I am in my home nation or outside of it. And isn't that the peculiar thing? I find it exasperatingly and unendingly curious that no matter where you or I go, and no matter how many years one has lived in one country, the smile, like the body of a woman, like the lives of members of a minority group, is unendingly and unapologetically ridiculed and demeaned, and it starts, sometimes, with just a smile. It can start with something so small, something you might think of as so superficial. Until it is ridiculed to the point where the acidity of the judgment, the misogyny, the racism, the transphobia, the homophobia, the xenophobia, the objectification eats away past the surface to to the very beating heart of a person.

Let me put this simply as my last example just from the personal experience I can give- walk down the street of a busy city with a woman, and you might see why we are tired. And there's a whole plethora of experiences out there that you should listen to that I have not had to experience based on my own identity. People who could write novels due to experiences that have been forced upon them due to their race, nationality, or gender expression. My point being-as a species that I- having grown up in the Bible Belt and taught for years as a little girl was made in the image of a God who is supposed to love all- as a species we are doing a terrible job of loving each other. And the preachin' without practicing ain't helpin'.

In all of my musings, here's to hoping that the caging of bodies ceases. That the destruction of human bodies in their own race, gender, sexuality, individuality, simply trying to live, that the destruction of humans just trying to survive, that the destruction of our hopes for peace discontinues. That we recognize that the very vast diversity of perception that paints something so surface-level as a smile differently in all corners of the earth is further evidence of how we were made to be a diverse world full of love for and acknowledgement and appreciation and embrace of the diversity of each other. Here's to hoping that we see not only the versatility in the presence of, and lack thereof, the smile, but also simultaneously beyond the smile to the heart of our needs and dreams as human beings.