The Curse of the Smiley Faces

I have a classmate who’s always drawing smiley faces in the spirit of pure boredom and randomness, or as we know of it – everyday life, when boring, everyday objects fly at you regularly in a random manner and make you forget about being happy.

If you’ve seen his drawings, you’d see that smiley faces are not just two isolated dot-specks overseeing the arc of a positive quadratic graph (for even its gradient does not determine the intensity of happiness), but are, in fact, also available in a spectrum of geometrical figures and twisted shapes (however lopsided one’s mouth may be, or slitty one’s eyes can be). Yet he draws them all in black ink on white paper, something like how a Negro’s white teeth look especially immaculate against his dark skin.

Yesterday, that classmate went about adorning the school with his smiling masterpieces in frenzy, bathing the corridors in an aura of happiness complemented by the few rays of sunlight that made it through the concrete finality of everything. They gave the school a quaint, Christmas-like feeling, just that instead of seeing red, green and gold baubles all around with swishing, silky banners and multi-colored neon lights, you saw faces and faces and more faces all smiling at you – albeit toothless smiles (since you can’t really draw teeth with black markers), but happy nonetheless. At any rate, you’d have thought you were walking through a gallery of portraits and Mona Lisas, with their perpetual gaze on the passers-by.

Every corner and crevice was soon infected by this unnatural influx of delirium: no more notice-board announcements, or corkboards displaying students’ teenage angst poetry, or faltering cracks of paint, or profanity-infested graffiti, just a pandemic of smiley faces. Several other students joined my classmate in his efforts, but his resplendently creative masterworks stood alone besides their stereotypical smiley faces.

“What’s the point of this?” I asked him in the midst of his euphoric craze while gesturing vaguely at the walls, but he simply smiled at me in reply. His own smiling face was not perfect – a slightly lopsided mouth, slitty eyes, Coke-corroded teeth and a pale, sickly tongue; but with all the colorless smiley faces in the backdrop that each came with its own set of features, they were still smiling with the same kind of happiness all at the same time, just as my classmate was.

Everyone who walked past with homework-heavy schoolbags soon started smiling, because in all the boredom and randomness of everyday life (that somehow made you forget all about being happy), there was suddenly a terribly random apparition of ecstasy plastered across all the corridor walls – obviously, they thought, the work of an extremely bored person. Yet this new, smiling sense of boredom and randomness that never repeated its facial features twice made them remember how to smile, just like how a photograph gives you memories where you smile and laugh at yourself trapped in time, smiling and laughing in there.

Even the most menacing mathematics teachers or highly horrible history lecturers stopped dead in their tracks in utter bewilderment, for the simple fact that: no student had ever attempted to cross the threshold of good cheer. In ominous fury, the school’s staff set out to abolish such an embellishment of the school and suppress the smiling, for their sadism genes programmed them to be self-pleasuring, torturous beings. One by one they ripped the sheets of paper bearing the smiley insignia off the walls and notice boards, but the torrential onslaught of happiness swooped all over the walls yet again in a short space of time, for the boredom and randomness of everyday life prompted the students to be part of the smiley movement, and the teachers could find no way to extinguish the wildfire that burned on and on for the whole of yesterday.

This morning as I arrived at school, I was greeted by a wave of smiles – smiles that were not only hand-drawn, but also emblazoned on everyone’s face – cheeks, lips, and all. The corridors had transformed into an art gallery over night, and students were free to stick their drawings and sketches of smiley faces all around. There was no imperfect smile, for all shared the same essence of happiness.

It was no surprise to see all the students smiling, but the new sight was the teachers all smiling with beaming radiance, each one flaunting their pearly whites. In their bid to stop the smiley movement, they too had begun smiling with as much happiness as they could muster, so that the smiley faces all around them would not appear with as much happiness as they did with unhappy people frowning in the foreground. Everyone was smiling amidst the boredom and randomness of everyday life, until smiling became an ever-refreshing and regular aspect of everyday life, and happiness became an infection which no one tried to cure.