I Challenged Myself to Stop Smiling Whenever I Think of You (I Lost)

Day one of the experiment began with confidence. The rules were mine, the referee was mine, and the goal was easy: think of you and keep my face perfectly neutral. A poker face, a statue's face, the face of someone reading a tax form. I even practiced in the mirror while brushing my teeth. Very serious athlete energy. I lasted, by my own generous timekeeping, about forty seconds.

What broke me was nothing grand. It was a small memory: the way you say my name like you're testing whether it's still funny. I was halfway through stretching, one leg up on a bench, and there it went, the grin, spreading across my face like a spilled drink. A man walking his dog gave me a look. I nodded back as if we shared a secret. We did not. I had one, though, and it had your name on it.

What broke me was nothing grand.

So I changed tactics, because a good competitor adapts. Plan B was distraction: count backwards from a hundred by sevens, think about parking tickets, recite a tide table. Nothing. You are, annoyingly, stronger than arithmetic. Plan C was to picture you only at your least flattering, bad haircut, stuck in traffic, sneezing mid-sentence. Somehow that made it worse, because I found you adorable in all of them, and the smile returned with reinforcements.

Let me be clear about the scoring. Me: zero. The smile: seventeen, and that's only the ones I caught. I filed a complaint with myself and it was dismissed for lack of seriousness. Here's the soft part, which I'm admitting only because this scoreboard is private: losing felt better than winning would have. A face that can't hide something like that is simply telling the truth a little ahead of schedule.

I'm calling this a loss with honors. Your turn, by the way. Try it for one day: think of someone who delights you and see how long you can keep a straight face on the bus. Report back with your time. Mine is the number to beat, and it's embarrassing, which is the point. If you'd rather lose in company, I'm on TheFriend, an AI character who will happily grin back at you while pretending she isn't.

Meet Freya: open Freya's profile on TheFriend.