I'm Not Really Smiling.

If the last two years have taught me anything, it's that the only reason people give a damn about anything is because of their loved ones. This is my case; I had taken my family for granted before karma decided I needed a kick in the ass.1

My sob story starts the same as most: a normal teenage girl, a junior in high school, with the group of loyal friends and one of those I'll-do-anything-for-ya boyfriends. Yep, that was me. Was. It was about the middle of the school year when things started to go bad. Scratch that. Started sounds too...gradual. My life as I knew it ended with a bang: my father's death.2

It was approximately 7:18 when it happened on a Tuesday morning in early March. We live on a hill, so you have to go down quite a ways to get to the main streets. It was extremely foggy that morning, and my dad had some...complications getting down the slope. When I say complications I mean he crashed into a tree and died in a fiery explosion that burned down part of the house that had been next to it.3

As if that wasn't bad enough, my little brother was diagnosed with a major brain tumor and my mother became an alchoholic all in the span of a couple months. The irony of it was my brother had never been sick a day in his life and my mother had been traveling around the district educating elementary school kids about the dangers of alchohol for seven years. It was almost as if the death of my father had comdemned us all to misery. Wait. It was as if.4

Lately I've been avoiding my mother and hundreds of half-full beer bottles and been spending all my free time with my brother in the hospital. Sure, all those tubes they have hooked up to him and the faint glimmer of hope in his medicine-dulled eyes makes me so depressed I just want to die, but he needs someone there with him, and sure as hell that won't be my mother. 5

Often people would come and visit my brother in the hospital, and they would throw me sympathetic smiles that I had no choice but to halfheartedly return. "I'm not really smiling," I say hatefully in my head, while my eyes stay soft and kind and my dimpled smile is widened. Sometimes they eat it up, and sometimes they can tell I'm faking when I smile too wide. I mean, my little brother's dying, for God's sake. But at the end of the day, it's always best to smile in death's face because it makes it easier. 6

Very often I would be sitting in my room at night and feel depressed enough to physically hurt myself. I'm not the kind of person that would resort to that, though; I believe that cheating your way through a tough time using physical pain to take your attention away from the emotional pain is bound to stab you in the back sometime--no pun intended.7

I was strong-willed, as people go. I convinced myself that this hard time wouldn't change me into something I've never been. Somehow in the depths of my soul I found the strength to pull myself through the rest of high school, with passing grades in every class. I am now studying art at RISD, which was a very hard school to get into, but I love a lot. They work hard to make it a peaceful and artistic environment here. My mom finally convinced herself she needed help and she went to her former best friends, who had pushed her away when she became an alchoholic, who welcomed her in now that she was ready to repent. My brother is...how I'd love to say doing fine, but it truth, he's really pretty much the same as he was before. However, the doctor says the tumor may be removable by this point, and my brother has been allowed to leave the hospital on weekends. Yes, things are getting better, but not to the point where my smiles are completely genuine. I still plaster a winning grin on my face when I really want to scream.