We had goldfish and they circled around and around in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes covering the picture window. My mother, always smiling,  wanting us all to be happy told me “Be happy, Henry, choose right it’s better to be happy if you can” but my father continued to scream several times a week while raging inside his six foot two frame because he couldn’t understand what was attacking him from within. My mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, crying two or three times a week, telling me to be happy. “Henry, smile why don’t you ever smile?” and then she would smile and show me how and it was the saddest smile I ever saw. One day the goldfish died all five of them. They floated on the water on their sides their eyes still open. When my father got home from work, he threw them to the cat there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother smiled.
People don’t give girls enough credit. I’m in the ninth grade now and the last time I studied a uniquely female narrative in English class was sixth grade. That might not seem like a lot, three years, but it is. The difference between 12 and 15 between girl and…  We’re reading to kill a mocking bird and I was walking home one day thinking about how Dill’s hair was describe as duck fluff or how Scout viewed reading as breathing and what I’d help my mom make for  dinner when Someone a man, grown man told me to “smile sweetheart!” Odd isn’t it? Telling some stranger to at least look happy. You know it only takes one more muscle than smiling to punch someone in the teeth. Bloods better than tears anyway, action over thought thoughts left lingering wriggling through veins and vital organs trying to fight something you know is bigger than you, because if there is no struggle you lose the cold and broken Hallelujah of… well at least you fought... Don’t tell sad girls to smile. Don’t tell sad girls to smile because she might be the type that gets cut by hipbones. Don’t tell sad girls to smile because she might still be trying to scrub someone else’s sin from her skin. Hot water, holy water it all flows under the same bridge eventually, and the dead can only feel cold so if she can feel the burning water then maybe… maybe.  Don’t tell sad girls to smile because by allowing herself to feel happy she accepts that she knows the contrast too well.  And if she does want to smile she does it for herself or someone she can be vulnerable with not some slack job, hand-hawing patriarchal nice guy who doesn’t find a frown appealing, she might actually have a good reason to be sad. So don’t you tell me to smile. It is not your mouth. It is not yours to consume, to kiss, to find comfort in when the windows rattle in the storm or when your heart rattles in your rib cage like seeds in the dry earth, unable to grow without a little bit of water and sunshine and tenderness. And if you really want a sad girl to smile then you hold her until your drenched in the perfume from the gardens you’ve planted in her heart so that every time her wounds reopen, she bleeds bouquets. But I am not yours to hold and if you keeping walking around telling sad girls to smile no one will ever want to be, and if you come any closer I’ll bite you. And smile red.