Crossing my path

Sometimes, when I am driving, I think too much. I see trees, buildings and people. People walking, talking, about to cross the road and... wait a sec! CROSSING THE ROAD?! So I hit the brakes and as of yet, I have always done so in time. I feel stupid and sorry so I usually end up with a funny expression, like an assembly of pieces from different expressions. I like to call it my apologetic smile. Mostly when I abstain from... running over people, and do so with a good margin and clear intent, they hardly look in my direction. However, my funny grimace seems to do wonders. People are usually watching me intently at this point. I suppose they’re making sure they’re not about to die with tire marks across their face and an imprint of an italic H for Hyundai on their side. Also, when they have established that they will live, they want to know if I’m half asleep or just your average asshole. Anyway, they all seem to be content with the amount of genuine remorse displayed across my face. After all, I am about as hard to read as a lone neon sign in the dark. Most smile, some even wave. I’ve wondered a lot about this.

 Maybe it’s just my face... I think it looks something like this:   

This is how I imagine that I look, but I don’t really know. My face is simply out of my hands and I’ve given up trying to control it a long time ago. The more I try to look normal, the stranger I look. Plain and simple. I talked about my lack of talent with a friend of mine once, to try to sort it out, but it pretty much stranded as we couldn’t really be sure if she was really bad at reading facial expressions, or I was really bad at making them. Still, it is pretty well established that my face never look the way I intend for it to look. The expression in question probably looks a bit like I’m stuck in the process of changing it. Like when you’re on the internet and your browser is crashing, while you were trying to synchronise your iPod with iTunes, but you got so fed up with waiting for that piece of shit program to respond (I’m growing old here!), so you started Spotify, but Spotify is desperate to highjack your iPod and immediately picks a fight with iTunes. Also you might have forgotten to shut down Photoshop. BAM! System failure! This is basically what happens to my face. The muscles in my face just don’t understand why I would want to smile while feeling so miserably ashamed. I would make a terrible actor to say the least.

 At some point the hang up resolves itself, and I remember not to try to make my face do anything it doesn’t want to.