my sheets will never be silent
whispers trailed between your fingers
i’ve always wanted to kiss people
through windows my astral heart
every birthday i ask for cookies
the cakes are made en masse
i used to draw mountains
but people make better horizons
if you build a sea of night
if you hide beneath the stars
someone will find you
Sometimes I feel old. I don’t think that it’s all bad. My toes creak and my body shivers in the cold. I have trouble getting out of bed because I’m afraid of how I could get hurt. Life has made me hope too many times, and I each time i got burned. But I’ve gotten good at it.
I get better at hoping every day, like the way the next term paper is better than the last. Like the way I love you more and more every day, in little different but noticeable ways.
I fall down the cliff, and I climb my way up. I scrape my skin and my heart. Sometimes I cry a little. Maybe I cry a lot. But every time, I get better. And everytime, as I’m scaling that face, with bare hand and thin jeans, I look out at the sea. I see things that weren’t there before…and I let go of them.
I’m beginning to suspect that hope is what life should, what my life should be about. Everytime I think I can’t make it, everytime I think about taking another bottle of pills, I realize that I don’t want to go. Even when things seem pointless, hopeless, and gone- I can’t.
I’m beginning to think that hope is a part of me. I don’t understand where it comes from. I’ve had nights when I scratched myself bloody, nights when I awoke in a bed of my own skin…but I keep going.
Sometimes hope pokes fun at me. I want to cry and mope and blame God. And then hope comes from out of nowhere- from inside me. I’m so set on crying, on feeling bad for myself, that I say in my head, “No! You can’t hope. No! What? Oh. Darn it.” Hope makes me realize that feeling sorry for yourself is an excuse. It’s an excuse to do nothing. So I keep climbing.
Sometimes I feel young. I eat junk food. I dream about being an astronaut slash president slash pulitzer writer slash rockstar slash nomad slash moviestar. I watch bad tv. I’m still afraid of the dark.
Have you ever cried so much that everything seemed funny? Or you had your wet eyes closed for so long that, when you opened them, the world was bright and new? That’s your body telling you to hope. Because nothing lasts forever, good or bad- but especially the bad. There’s a saying- if you don’t like the weather in Kentucky, wait a minute. If you don’t like the weather in your heart, close your eyes. Just for a moment.
Hope is something that lives in our blood. A heart doesn’t know the day it dies. It could fail any moment. Lightning could strike you. There could be a plague. But it keeps pumping, day in and day out, no matter what happens. It hopes for the next day, the next hour, the next second to stay alive. It hopes, even when you aren’t.
As long as you’re alive, you have hope.
