Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

JayMerill

been living for so long was getting increasingly hard to maintain. I felt more threatenedbythepresence of my housemates than I used to and couldn’t help wondering whether the smile itself was the cause of the trouble. Had it lost its charm? Then I saw at once I wasn’t starting off on the right track. Because the smile was part of what I am, not some superimposed print. Though that’s exactly what I’d tried to force it to be. I had to face the fact that seeing my smile as just an empty screen that could be scrolled down at will so as to fool people was a false picture. Perhaps this way of looking at things had been my greatest weakness. Oh, the dangers of deception! I aimed at deceiving others, which in itself was bad enough,

but in reality all that I’d succeeded in doing was deceiving myself. I’d got into all this smiling as a means of self- protection. Because one thing I really have never been able to stomach was the way these house- sharers thought of me. I could just see the word poor rolling around in their brains in the same way their eyes rolled around in their heads sometimes when they looked at me. If we happened to meet in the hallway for instance, when they hadn’t been expecting to see me there because I moved around so quietly. My very quietness unnerved them, I knew that. And I could almost hear them say: It’s as if he’s a ghost. Poor thing .

Glea and Aggie-Girl were

132