My passport has expired. I’m standing in front of a white screen at the back of a UPS store as a young man holds up a camera to take my picture.
He lowers the camera, and says, “Don’t smile.”
In my old passport, my face is plumper and my uniformly brown hair is parted in the middle rather than on the side. I look younger, of course — ten years younger — but my smile, at least as far as I can tell, is ageless. It’s the same toothy smile I’ve had for decades : in the previous passport, and in the one before that. It’s the smile that has linked my past, expired selves to my ever-evolving present.
My smile has been a point of comparison since my first passport at age five. But it’s also been the crux of my visible identity. It’s been the goodness and the broadness and the hopefulness I’ve called on since childhood, the small but meaningful act of freedom I’ve performed through loneliness, inadequacy, shame and doubt, through feelings I couldn’t even name lying awake in bed at night scared of the dark in a downstairs bedroom of my parents’ house, with everyone else asleep on the second floor. It was the first thing I learned to fake through lengthening bones and expanding hips, through the friendships of college, through giddy passions that ended poignantly or disastrously, in all the shapes and colors of heartbreak.
My smile was the narrow shield I could always hide just enough of my true self behind when I sold myself short or took the low road because the high road was under construction. It cheered me up, if I let it, long before selfies and Facebook—a flicker of potential, a non-alcoholic cocktail of dopamine and endorphins. I didn’t have to wait for the bars to open. I could tip that shot-glass into my brain no matter where I was or who I was with, at any time of day or night.
“Why can’t I smile?” I ask the man in the UPS store. “I’ve always smiled.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. They’re considered ‘unnatural facial expressions,’” he says. “At least according to the US State Department.”
I’m flabbergasted. I stare.
“You can try to smile, if you want,” he offers, “as long as you don’t show your teeth. Otherwise, they’ll reject your application, and we don’t give refunds.”
The young man snaps the picture. He leans forward to show me the image. It looks like a mug shot. I’m squinting the way people do when they’ve absentmindedly rubbed their eyes after mincing jalapeños. He prints out two copies and slides them into a small folder.
If my smile has been the string holding together countless faded and forgotten moments, it has just been cut. It feels as though invisible beads have started falling through the air all around me. The lynchpin of my identity been mandated out of existence. What won’t I be allowed to do, next? Laugh? Flirt? Breathe? Hug? It’s a dark, dark day when you can’t smile the way you want to, when you want to, where you want to. How long before the oceans dry up? Before ashes and brimstone rain through the trees?
I’m being overdramatic. The reality is probably something far less Machiavellian. Modern day software in airport scanners gets thrown off by teeth–something about the uniform whiteness, I’m sure, or the symmetry. Whatever the reason, smiles are most certainly not and never will be unnatural facial expressions. The U.S. State Department just prioritizes efficiency, and a machine’s ability to read biometric data, over our freedom to smile.
All the more reason to keep smiling.
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Photo: Pixabay
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