This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/blairaey on 2025-07-17 19:20:01+00:00.

It started as a clinical suggestion. My therapist, Dr. Adler, had this theory he was excited about. “Facial feedback,” he called it. The idea that the physical act of smiling, even a fake one, could influence the brain’s chemistry. Trick the body and the mind follows. I was skeptical, but that’s nothing new. I’ve been in therapy for years and most things don’t stick. He gave me a small mirror with a smooth black frame and told me to spend five minutes each morning smiling at myself. Not a fake one, he said. A gentle, sustained smile. Just enough to signal safety to the nervous system.

I felt like an idiot the first few times I tried it. You don’t realize how unnatural a smile feels when there’s no emotion behind it. The corners of my mouth quivered from the strain. My jaw ached. Still, I did it. Five minutes each morning, like a mechanical ritual.

By the end of the first week, I noticed the smile showing up on its own. I’d be making coffee or walking past a reflective surface, and I’d catch myself already grinning with no awareness of when it started. It didn’t even feel good. Just present. Like something I’d put on and forgotten to remove.

I mentioned it to Dr. Adler. He nodded, pleased. The brain’s remembering how to connect the signal with the feeling, he said. That’s a good sign.

I wanted to trust him. I’d tried everything else and this, however strange, was simple. Passive. No pills, no confronting childhood trauma, no breathing through panic attacks. Just a smile.

So I kept going.

Then something shifted.

I was on a video call for work, pretending to listen while someone explained the new process for vendor onboarding, when a colleague messaged me privately. “You okay? You look… really happy.” I typed back some joke about finally understanding spreadsheets. But afterward, I opened my webcam preview and stared.

I was smiling. Too wide. The kind of smile that shouldn’t last more than a few seconds before slipping into discomfort. My eyes were dead, but my face was stretched with something not quite joy.

I tried relaxing my face. The muscles trembled but refused. It was like trying to lower your arm after holding it out too long. It just stayed in place, numb and rigid. I had to push my cheeks down with both hands and even then, the relief only lasted a few seconds.

After that, it got worse. The smile stopped waiting for permission. It arrived when I woke up. It lingered after crying. I’d find myself standing in the hallway, unaware of how long I’d been there, grinning at nothing. I wasn’t just smiling anymore. I was being smiled.

Sleep became strange. I’d wake up with bite marks on the inside of my mouth. My lips were often split at the corners, blood dried in tiny spiderweb cracks. I set up my phone camera on the nightstand to watch myself overnight. Most of the footage was unremarkable, just me tossing and turning, breathing heavily.

But at 3:46 a.m., without warning, I would go still. My body would straighten. My lips would curl up like puppet strings had just been yanked.

And then I would speak.

The first night I whispered something I couldn’t make out. The next night the audio was clearer. I remember now. I remember your face.

The voice wasn’t mine. It was familiar somehow, like an impression of me made by someone who had never quite heard a human speak. Soft, too smooth, like breath over glass.

I showed the footage to Dr. Adler. He didn’t flinch. He watched it all, paused it, rewound a few seconds, then turned off the screen.

Some part of you is trying to communicate, he said. It’s not unusual for the subconscious to manifest through ritual. Repetition breeds openings.

I asked what that meant and he smiled. Not kindly. Flatly. As if he’d been waiting for this part. As if it always ended up here.

You should continue, he said.

I haven’t seen him since. His office is empty. His name is no longer on the directory. There’s no record of his license with the state board. Just one blurry photograph on a university archive, and in it, he’s smiling. But his teeth are blurred, as if the image couldn’t hold them clearly, as if they didn’t belong to him.

The mirror he gave me doesn’t reflect me anymore. It reflects the room behind me, slightly off, slightly wrong. Things are always a bit out of place. The shadow under the chair is too thick. The hallway seems deeper than it is. Sometimes I see a shape that shouldn’t be there. Sometimes the reflection smiles first.

I avoid looking at it now, but the smile remains. It stretches without muscle. It holds without tension. When I speak, it’s behind every word. When I eat, I feel it under the chewing. When I’m alone, I feel something else trying to wear it with me.

I think I was supposed to stop. I think the five minutes weren’t just a limit but a boundary. A safeguard. And I broke it.

There’s pressure behind my eyes now. I can feel something unfolding under my skin like wet paper. I touch my cheeks and they don’t respond. I screamed into the sink this morning and watched the corners of my mouth hold steady, calm, serene.

I understand now. It isn’t a smile. It’s a wound shaped like one. A rupture that looks polite. I think something came through it.

And I think it likes the way I fit.

Tonight, I cut the muscles. Not all the way, just enough to stop it from pulling. I stood in front of the mirror and saw blood drip down over white teeth, and I thought it was finally over.

But in the reflection, I was still smiling.

And then it blinked.

I didn’t.