HOPE
I've always thought of Hope as a beautiful thing. It is the driving force behind the tidal wave that is my emotional resilience. The light, no matter how dim, that illuminates and nurtures my deepest rooted longings. Hope is the dirt under my fingernails, as I scratch and claw at the walls of a seemingly inescapable pit. Hope is April, on a day when the sun is strong enough to paint the city walls with early spring but not quite enough to blister the streets. Hope is essential, I used to think, in maintaining any sense of semblance of sanity.
Hope is also, however, my poison. It feeds off of the earth-shattering uncertainty that simmers beneath my skin. It pounces, instigates, peels back the layers of rational thought until I'm left with a feeling of deep disconnect from what is real. Hope is the magnet that deters my compass needle from true North. It infects my mind with fantasies that grip me like a snake coiled around its dinner. And those emotions, the ones I'm capable of conjuring from merely imaging, feel so heartbreakingly honest that it takes a moment to remember what they are—illusory. The snap back to reality rattles me with stunning disorientation. It is that moment, dripping with lucidity, that feels like a dagger straight through the heart.
I've come to think of Hope as an enemy. A treasonous two-faced bitch—but one that I can't seem to stop forgiving time and time again. I invite it into my bed, to sleep next to me, share my pillow and breath my air, until it spirals into an agency I cannot control. Hope is tequila. The salt, the shot, the lime. It all goes down easily—far too easily. I pour another and another and for a while I twirl and sing in a vat of brilliant elation. But the feeling is fleeting and soon I am pressing my cheek into the bathroom floor, wishing for any relief from the heat that radiates behind my cheeks and the head-splitting agony that accompanies vomit and shame. Hope is an experience con-man. One who reads his victim with ease better suited for the morning paper, channels in around the most feeble of weak spots, aims and strikes bullseye every time. Hope is maddening, because no amount of my own self-awareness can form a shield solid enough to repel a round of bullets disguised as dizzying daydreams.
If Hope is my poison then what is its antidote? I don't believe there is one. As mind-numbing as it is, nauseating in it mercilessness, Hope is flame lit so deeply in my core that there is no extinguishing it. Whether is rages like a forest fire engulfing coastal California or flickers like the final spark of a dying lighter, it pulses through my veins all the same. I think that my most honest moments are fueled by sparkling possibilities. The feeling of maybe, just this once. In these moments, I feel the raw beat of my own life. It feels like dangling a hand half an inch away from a lit stove.
It is this feeling of vulnerability that is so beautifully, inherently human.