Hope is a funny thing. It's not an emotion. It's not tangible. It's nothing you can wrap your arms around. It's not a place. It's not a person. It's a feeling. An inkling. A special hunch that can swarm your heart and fuel your desires. It can be a strong driving force in your life. It can show up from the earliest of ages and stick with you for an eternity. And if you're not careful, it can get left behind, dumped and forsaken without your noticing.
I cried tonight. In a restaurant. Into my empty sushi plate. And it would have been embarrassing if I wasn't so emotionally exhausted. The past two years of my life haven't been a struggle. They've been a constant attempt at walking through a pit of quicksand. In case you've never seen an Indiana Jones movie, the quicksand always wins.
I couldn't tell you the exact moment I let hope slip through my fingers, but I could point to my own personal timeline and identify when my life started to fall apart and my heart and mind both decided to abandon the hope ship. It was right around the time that I had fallen hard in love with someone who woke up one morning and decided he wanted to take back all the sweet and wonderful things he had said the night before and no longer wanted to be the light in my eyes. That was also around the time that I decided to move away from all my friends and everything familiar to go back home. For what I had no idea. But as soon as I did family members started to die off. And by the end of the year I was let go from a job I had had for the past 3 years and was hoping would stay with me through my next move. In less than 12 months, I had gone from absolute bliss and ecstasy to a sad and angry mess.
Fast forward a couple years and you'll find a girl who went from sad, angry, and later bitter, to hopeless and constantly waiting for that illusive rug to be pulled out from under her. I had moved past the anger and bitterness and went straight into disbelief that anything good would ever happen to me. I had come to expect that life was supposed to fall apart. In short, good things only happen in the movies.
Fast forward a little more to the present day and you'll find a girl choking back crocodile sized tears, mid-conversation, in a sushi restaurant, because her friend just hit the nail on the head. He had just defined all her problems with one word: hope. I hadn't lost hope. I had abandoned it. I left it back in the shower of my old apartment where I cried my eyes out over a lover lost. I had left it in those moving boxes that held all my possessions between here and there. I had washed my hands of hope when all those good things that were supposed to happen didn't.
Ah, hindsight with it's perfect vision...
It's a scary move to make, going from hopelessness to belief. Hope reminds me of the feeling I had as a kid standing on Main Street in Disneyland. Everything was magical and all things were possible. As an adult it's terrifying to put yourself in a position of belief, because the let-down can be agonizing. But here I am, at one o'clock in the morning, typing out tonight's events and hoping.
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