Smile

She stared at the clouds. They did seem different. In this city everything seemed different. For a while. But the affect soon wore off. And she realized they are the same clouds, the same sky, the same ground, the same people no matter where she went.

She noticed that she had always smiled in her pictures, and she wondered if the smile was real or if it was just a reflex. She wouldn’t say she was unhappy, and if she did she would never be able to pinpoint the cause of it. She just had a vague feeling that something was missing, and that it was to be found somewhere out there.

When she was young she used to stare at the clouds for hours. People would ask her why and at the time she couldn’t answer. But now she knew that even then she was looking for something. And she thought it might be found in the clouds. But after she had stared long enough the clouds, once magical, turned into nothing more than geometrical shapes, white fluffy vapor. So she looked elsewhere. Life, people, books, her own mind. And when she had exhausted everything that was around her, she left, thinking it would be different somewhere else. But the clouds were the same everywhere she went.

She wasn’t sure where else to look, but she believed that she would eventually find what she was looking for. It was this belief, and this belief alone, that made her smile genuine.