Hope

You want to hope, as much as you hate to hope. Because hope is painful more often than it is joyful, despite what capitalism would have you believe when they try to sell you those pretty but generic motivational plaques, white-painted wood with elegant cursive black letters, forty-nine ninety-nine to make you feel all better. Hang it on the wall, in the living room perhaps, next to the matching one you should buy to proclaim that “Family Lives Here”, as if you couldn’t possibly recall who resides in your household without purchasing the reminder.

Hope is a sinking dread in your chest, despite the title of that movie you never watched that claims it floats. You wonder if you should watch the film, now that you’re an adult and not quite so allergic to anything mainstream, but honestly, you still aren’t much for hope and happy endings, or the movies that probably get to those happy endings by dealing with problems that are all too real.

You prefer your problems fantastical, allegorical, viewed through a lens of magic and folklore and adrenaline, problems you will never encounter in real life but can look at and use to relate to the universal sense of struggle that entangles us all from day to day. You prefer your endings…not simple, precisely, but clear. Black-and-white even if they are written so as to appear gray, because you, you know the truth: It was the only ending possible, and it is not open for interpretation no matter what the literary theorists say.

Your belief in decisive endings is why you never liked those Choose Your Own Adventure stories, because what good is a story and an ending if both are mutable and therefore false? Yes, there are a hundred thousand ways the world might unfold but we do not live in a complex multiverse of infinite rewritings, we live in this world, the singular one where there are no do-overs, no editing passes, no quiet hidings of the stories too dark to share with the world.

The events that unfold here are irrevocable, immutable, and perhaps to those more accustomed to playing God with words this fact is especially difficult for us to accept. To be so powerful in the microcosm of our own making, and so powerless in the macrocosm of reality. To know the answers as we craft a world, only to be left questioning in the one we live in.

But you weren’t thinking of that, you remember, you were thinking of hope. Of how you hope for a better world that you don’t believe in. How maybe you don’t have all the answers for your own stories after all because you keep trying to find the answer to that one, the one that asks how you take the good you find in individual people, in those who care for their friends and their neighbors and their communities, and turn that outward across a mass of greed and selfishness.

You ask how you are to hope when, though the people you surround yourself with are kind and compassionate, atrocities still scar the planet. And even that word, atrocity, feels too inadequate a descriptor because it has seen too much use of late and its prevalence has lessened its impact. You ask how you are to hope when, though humanity as a whole does not feel like the awful creature it is depicted as, the structures put in place to govern humanity seem only intent on destroying it.

You wonder how hatred and bigotry seem always to rise to the top of a political structure, as if they are powered by an engine that requires no fuel, no rest, and no maintenance, while compassion is so easily stretched thin, past the breaking point, trod underfoot and forgotten. There is an idiom you always hated, the one about one rotten apple ruining the bunch, and you wonder now if you hated it because even in your infancy you understood how true it was.

But unlike with apples, the world seems to have failed to discover how to throw out its rotten people. And isn’t that the answer you’re looking for? The one you keep trying to find in your little make-believe worlds with your little make-believe people? A way to get rid of the rotten ones. A way to believe that humanity can be better, can be made better, can stay better.

So you see, it isn’t all about playing God, after all. It’s about—dare you say it?—hope. Because that is where you find yours—in your own stories and in others. In this place where people have the time and the clarity to show you what they are, what you are, and you can listen and share and learn.

For a little while, disappearing into those worlds, you can not feel so alone. For a little while, you can imagine that hope will be what it was meant to be, a joy instead of a hurt. For a little while, you can rest.

So rest, because tomorrow you wake again, and the ending of the world hasn’t yet been written.