lines.

I went to Clairettes with some old friends today. I was in the middle of eating my potato pancakes when I glanced over to a booth that was a couple tables away and to the left. It was there that a woman sat facing me, across from a man in a green scarf and an old mans hat. They were eating and talking in quiet voices. I sat and stared at this woman's face for awhile, probably longer than socially appropriate.

She was maybe in her 50s, but if you looked at her face you could tell that those 50 years or so were not generous. It looked like the weight of a life of hardship had seeped into the skin on her face and dragged everything downward. Her face, just sitting still, was in a permanent frown. Lines. There were so many lines. I imagined looking at the side of her face and seeing a tear track running from the corner of her eye to the side of her jaw, where thousands of tears had run down and left their mark. She laughed once when I was looking at her, and her face lit up, seemingly transforming her into an entirely different person. But then it just went back, her face resuming its position that it had been trained to take for years and years.

I want smile wrinkles when I'm old. No. Laughing wrinkles. Deep ones that reach all the way up into my cheeks. When people look at my face I want them to see a life filled with laughter and joy. I want them to see a woman who embraced life, and took the best from what she was given. When they read the lines on my face I want them to read "lived it, loved it, and laughed all the way through it."

Life can get pretty sucky and messy, and frown wrinkles probably aren't hard to come by. But goodness... I want laughter. Laughter forever.