YELLOW SMILE

How long can a smile live in this world, and how many do we have left.

Yellow is the smile of my face. I was uniquely born with a bright yellowish smile on my face. The kind that lights up and entire room. The kind to be seen from a mile away, brightening the path of goodness for myself and others around me. I always bring my smile wherever I go. Whenever I go, my smile is with me. My yellow bright smile, is a dirty yellow unhygienic teeth. But with a beautiful simple dimple to add to it when it opens up to smile.

This piece of written words is not to tell you more about my dirty yellowish teeth. But on how it came to be a shining smile. My face you see was a place of agony and despair... My life in the trenches side of the excellent state of Lagos. The city of opportunities or so they say. Where drugs are recruiting our youths more then the churches. Here where money is a drug and we are all looking for our next fix. Where am from they don’t smile, not even when they are high on drugs, neither in celebration or family gatherings nor festivals. We live like it a competition of who can stay the longest without smiling. There was never a reason to smile. In this part of the city, where pain is everywhere like the air we breathe. Chaos and violence rules the mind of the people. It was hard to crack a smile here.

Smiling was a task and people felt too busy for an additional unnecessary task. They say smile too much and you might be the next one life uses to make an example, make your whole existence a laughing stock. Going mad or losing your rational mental sanity to some random Nigerian problem was a common one. Youths without knowledge let drugs use them like a horny man uses young prostitutes and dumping them once satisfied. Mothers and daughters every night let the pain and suffering break them to the ground, soaking wet with tears from their eye on the bathroom floor. Fathers fall, get stepped on and never seem to be on their feet again. The life here was not to be a long one.

I don’t let the reins of the city get to me. I keep my soul in check and my heart alined. I intend on bringing my world and pouring my light of goodness onto this sad, filled with suffering world we are cursed to live in. Everyday, I make sure I made over 100 people smile, giving them a short minute of escapism from the sad reality society forced on them. To 60% of the people I made smile, I must be mad and mentally ill, giving me a strange look after they’ve smile like am a well dressed mad man. I do use very drastic ways to make them smile. For people so cut up on their life, it really takes so little to get them free from there shackles of reality. Like an igbo sales woman uses uncalled method to get sales, I go beyond that. Doing something unorthodox, unoriginal. I could just scream out loud in the middle of a crowd and say something funny or just start dancing on my way home. My most comfortable and common way is to act like a child and just shine my magical yellow teeth, lookingstraight into their eyes for an uncomfortable period of time. Letting my yellow bright smile do the trick, that always works. But I realized my efforts are often short time limited, the city always steals back the smile from their faces and my effects have very low value on a mass scale of persons.

I want to see more smiley faces on the bus, at the market, not only in church. We need more smiles then we need jobs. They say if they have jobs they would smile more, tell that to my sister and her co workers who work 9am to 9pm in a bakery and spends all their days trying not to smile because the job forbid a cheerful character. My mother’s co worker who is mad and hates his job like it’s his ex wife, who left him with nothing. We need more smiley faces for the kids, to give and show a sign of hope. I saw a kid yesterday being angry at a rock for not being useful, he kept shouting at it like his mother would do to him and kept hitting it around like his father would do to his mother. We’ve let the pain live in our hearts and rest on our faces.

It takes a well fed man to starch the little muscle of his face. They say if only we had more food to go round then we would have no reason not to smile. So did my friend Kiddo thought. Works in a bakery with limitless breads. But as the biblical saying goes “ man shall not live by bread alone”. The woman who sells food by the road side with four squeezing faces of little humans to her care. If only we had smiles, I tell you the leaf on the tree would grow bigger and colorful. We are on a short trip a very short one. The more we neglect the time we have and let the pain stay for too long we become the pain.

I took a walk with my pain. Is something I do occasionally. Just walk how far my legs could take me and I look at peoples face trying so hard to make them smile more and I almost lost my yellow bright smile. But I do believe a tree could make a forest if only there would be rain to flourish it and the bright yellow sun to bless it as I do to everyone I see with my yellow smile

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