Why I Can’t Stop Saying I’m Fine When I’m Not
“How are you?” is the easiest question in the world, and I have never once answered it honestly.
“Fine,” I say. Sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a small “good, you?” on top. It comes out of my mouth so smoothly that I don’t even hear it.
That Wednesday, Zoe asked, as she always does, and the word was already halfway out when I noticed that my throat felt tight, my hands were cold, and I had been thinking about the same unfinished message for four hours.
I was not fine. I was a whole drizzly afternoon in a trench coat. But the word was out, and the moment closed over it like water.
Why can’t I just say it?
What if they think I’m dramatic?
What if I say it and it becomes a big thing?
The fine machine
Zoe noticed. Of course she did. She never says much, but she watches closely, the way a person watches a kettle.
“You said fine,” she said later, on the bench behind the gym. “Your shoulders said something else.”
I started to say fine again, and she raised one eyebrow so slowly that I couldn’t help it. I laughed. And then, to my horror, my eyes got wet.
“It’s just,” I said, “fine is easy. If I say anything else, I have to explain it. And I don’t even know what it is.”
Zoe nodded like this was the most reasonable thing she had heard all week. “So don’t explain. Give me the weather.”
· · ·
The weather report
That was how the Weather Report began. Zoe’s rule was simple: instead of “fine,” you give a weather word. Nothing more. No reasons required.
“Sunny,” she said, pointing at herself. “With a chance of tacos.”
I thought about it honestly. It was the first time all day I had actually looked inside.
“Cloudy,” I said. “A little drizzly. Not a storm.”
She nodded, serious, as if I had told her the temperature of a distant planet. “Thanks for the report. Want an umbrella or a snack?”
“…A snack.”
That was all. She handed me half her granola bar, and the tight feeling in my throat loosened by one whole notch. I hadn’t explained anything. I hadn’t become dramatic. I had just told the truth in a very small word, and the world had not ended.
A notebook of small skies
These days, I keep a tiny page called Skies in the back of my notebook. At night I draw the weather of the day: a sun, a gray cloud, a bit of fog. It takes ten seconds. It is the most honest page I own.
And in the daytime, when somebody asks how I am, I try on a new word. Cloudy. Breezy. Foggy but clearing. It surprises me how often people say, “Oh, me too.” Fine, I think, was a door that kept everyone out. A weather word is a window.
I still say fine sometimes. It is a useful word, like a coat that fits in the right weather. But I’ve learned that it is allowed to be one option, not my only one.
With love,
Lina
