No, we are not a "fucking chill" chick

PalmaHow chic this woman is, look at her. I don't know her, but I have her next to me on the beach, on the bus, or I read her articles online. She is no one in particular and she is all of them at once. She is a type of woman. She is the woman who, effortlessly, makes you want to be like her. She is a woman to whom life seems to have asked permission to create her. In return, it gave her this face with just enough personality not to stop being beautiful. I don't know if she's cool or if it's because she has a mole right above her upper lip, where I would have always liked to have one. With that mole, it seems like the world should be a little easier. Maybe it's because she has naturally rosy lips or big, almond-shaped eyes, as if she's never known mascara.

Perhaps it was her name that predestined her to be remembered without even having introduced herself. A good compound name or a sonorous lineage, the kind your tongue tends to repeat because it makes it exercise different muscles, emit sounds to which it is not accustomed. And that is always fun. A good name does the work for you. When you arrive, it has already prepared the ground, satisfying the curiosity of those who await you, filling with a convoluted personality the void left by your initials. A little inner voice that says “ask, and it shall be given to you” is activated when people refer to you by your full name. You have done nothing and you are already somebody. Fake it until you make it. And you already have the first part done.

I don't know what's up with this girl. But she wears the same Birkenstocks as me, she's got the same bangs as me, and her Instagram tells me she does the same thing as me. Even so, if we were both Sims characters, I'd pick her a thousand times over myself. What separates us? Unlike her, I was born with these round cheeks from having lived it up since 1995. I pretend not to, but yes: I ask for permission and apologize constantly to everyone. I'd like to be mysterious, but mystery flees from me. I scare it more than if I wore my resume hanging around my neck. Because I need to explain everything about myself to you, so you'll understand that everything I do has a justification and will forgive me when I don't meet your expectations. In the meantime, I'll let out some pretty cynical jokes about myself to show you that I'm not pretentious, nor am I naive, and – above all – that I'm funny enough to defuse all this tension.

We are not what you would call "a girl chill "awesome", as in the aunts I would like to be if life were The Sims game. My friend Jabi tells me I need to relax. The other day he asked me if I didn't see that nobody else does everything I do or, rather, nobody else says yes to everything: lunch and pool with friends at 2 p.m., demonstration at 7 p.m., and film festival at 9 p.m. I understand he wanted to show me that I was trying to have too many personalities at once. So here we are, admitting that it's too late to not be everything I wanted to be.

In high school I learned to dissemble quite well: I balanced being the most studious and the most carefree, all to avoid falling into the repellent black hole. I pretended to get good grades effortlessly, to go out partying effortlessly, as if friends and exams weren't the most important thing to me. It was just as my prefrontal cortex was finishing forming that, in a crevice, this game of light and shadow, this trompe-l’œil –this artifice–, a mechanism for each person to see in me what you are looking for.

The art of expectation

At times I can seem like a puddle of oil –because I like to sleep, because sluggishness makes me late for everything– but my brain has the metabolism of a squirrel, especially in conversation. I anticipate the moment we run out of topics to have two or three in reserve and save you an uncomfortable silence. I listen to you attentively to ask you the questions you would never have asked yourself. And, if I'm premenstrual, I'll agree with you too much (but because I genuinely believe your opinion is worth more than mine).

As a passive smoker, I sometimes think I'd like to be a dialectical smoker – only in conversations – to space out my thoughts a bit, or at least the ones that come out of my mouth. I'd like to learn the art of expectation: to keep quiet because I'm searching for words at the same time as filters, to pause at the climax of the story to lick the paper, to divert my gaze to the lighter, to take a puff and gain time in my response. As if smoking would stop this discursive vomit, like a girl raising her hand in class and knowing she only has 30 seconds to answer; as if, numbed, I could stop seeing the other's gaze as a countdown that in 3, 2, 1… warns me that I've lost them. Like a death drive towards this not-so-chill girl that I am.