The Plasticity In our Smiles.

Every morning, before the sun had fully decided what kind of day it wanted to be, Marta stood in front of her bathroom mirror and practiced her smile.

Not the real one - that one had gone dormant months ago, curled somewhere deep inside her like an animal waiting out a storm....Caught In a permanent state of Hibernation.

This was the other smile, the one with the correct ratio of teeth to lips, the one that signaled I’m fine to anyone who needed to believe it.

She lifted her chin, softened her eyes, and watched the mask settle into place.

It always fit too well.

Outside, the city panted. It was a low, constant vibration, like a machine running slightly off balance. People said you got used to it. People said it was normal. People said a lot of things.

PEOPLE!...who can trust them anymore - you never know where their allegiance lie, when they will turn on you...one moment they are smiling sweetly - the next they will switch allegiances, attack you like rabid animals, bitten by the political rabies bug...

Marta stepped into the street and joined the flow. Her bright, painted smile stretches over something molten and restless underneath. This was the truth many people feel but rarely articulate: She exists in a system that asks for performance, not presence. It rewards the mask, not the heat beneath it.

Marta feels and knows that everything seems unreal - surreal, as if we are living in a dream - we grin like silly clowns.

We consume pretty pasty plastic tasteless food - declaring it delicious. Our palates now have become inured to the texture of plastic things - we smile plastic smiles. we pretend that all is well... but on the inside, on the deep depth of our insides - we blaze and seethe with the fire of a roaring inferno.

Nothing is right...everything is wrong. Yet...we keep pretending...

The system of life isn’t a single institution. It’s the whole choreography: social, economic, cultural, technological. A web of expectations that once promised stability but now feels like a stage-set held up by thin wooden beams.

- It asks you to smile, even when the smile feels synthetic, fake and stretched too tight.

- It rewards composure, even when the interior is burning.

- It praises adaptability, even when the adaptation requires shrinking, bending, erasing parts of yourself.

- It insists on normalcy, even when the normalcy is a performance everyone knows is false.

The system runs on agreement - not truth. Agreement to keep the surface smooth.

Agreement to pretend the friction is just “a busy week” or “a rough patch” rather than a structural misalignment.

It shapes the ones who can contort themselves into the expected form.

It shapes the ones who can smile on command.

It shapes the ones who can translate their inner fire into something palatable, marketable, efficient.

And it overlooks the ones who move at a different pace...

- the ones whose emotions don’t fit the script

- the ones who need depth in a world optimized for speed

- the ones who feel the misalignment in their bones and can’t un-feel it

Friction ...collapse. ..catastrophe. Pending...

It’s the daily grind of pretending the world is aligned when your body knows it isn’t.

It’s the forced grin in a meeting - the hollow “I’m fine”.

- the quiet dread of voicing the truth that demands more than it gives

- the sense that the system is extracting something essential while offering only the illusion of stability in return.

You’re not wrong to feel the blaze inside.

You’re not wrong to notice the wrongness outside.

You’re simply refusing to numb yourself to the friction that almost everyone else seems to have agreed to ignore.

And that attention - your attention - is already an act of clarity.

We are but actors on a movie screen...scenes after scene - of characters living in a made-up world...acting out a robotic ritual of pretence. We can keep tracing the contours of this misalignment until its shape becomes more and more unmistakably plastic...twisted and unrecognizable.

The system is everywhere, though no one ever called it that. It was just the way things worked.

It lived in the screens that blinked awake before you did.

It lived in the polite scripts exchanged in elevators.

It lived in the quiet pressure to keep moving, keep producing, keep smiling.

It can be slowly cruel. ...and mispositioned - like a door that never quite shut, or a song played half a beat too slow.

Most people didn’t notice. Or they noticed and pretended not to.

Pretending was easier. Pretending was rewarded.

At work, Marta sat at her desk beneath the soft glow of lights calibrated to mimic daylight. The office was designed to feel calm, predictable, ergonomic.

But something in it was always slightly off - The temperature was never right.

The chairs were engineered for comfort but left everyone shifting in their seats.

The air smelled faintly of citrus and something metallic underneath.

People moved through the space with the same plastic smile she wore, each one performing a version of themselves optimized for efficiency. They spoke in bright, clipped tones. They laughed at the right moments. They nodded at the right rhythms.

And beneath it all, Marta felt the fire.

A slow, steady burn.

Something like anger churned- but not exactly anger.

More like a pressure building in a sealed container.

She wondered if anyone else felt it.

She wondered if everyone did notice the quiet rage, slowly building.

During lunch, she sat with her coworkers in the break room. They discussed productivity apps, weekend plans, the latest update to the city’s transit system. The conversation flowed smoothly, frictionless, as if guided by an invisible script.

But the room itself was wrong.

The clock on the wall ticked half a second behind the rhythm of her heartbeat.

The refrigerator played in a minor key.

The fluorescent lights flickered in patterns too subtle to name.

No one mentioned any of it.

Someone joked about burnout.

Everyone laughed.

Marta laughed too, her plastic smile stretching just a little too tight.

Inside, the fire roared.

Then there are the Overlooked...

On her way home, she passed a man sitting on the curb, staring at the sky as if it held a secret only he could see. People walked around him without slowing, without looking. He didn’t fit the system’s choreography, so the system edited him out.

Marta paused.

For a moment, she felt the misalignment sharpen - a jolt of recognition, like seeing her own reflection from a strange angle.

The man didn’t smile.

He didn’t pretend.

He simply existed, unmasked, outside the hub.

She almost sat beside him.

Almost.

But the flow of the city nudged her forward, and she let it.

At home, she peeled off the smile and set it on the counter like a pair of gloves.

Her face felt heavier without it, but truer.

She sat in the dark, listening to the faint bustle of the world outside.

The fire inside her flickered, restless but contained.

Nothing had seemed out of place.

Nothing had changed.

The system still grated on.

People still smiled.

The displacement still pressed against her ribs like a pact she wasn’t supposed to discover.

But she had noticed.

And for now, her attention was enough.

Later, she mused...later.