Hope

Hope. Probably the vilest emotion in this entire world. 

It keeps you hanging on a non-existent thread. For that one call that you know will never come. For that one text message that will not come. It keeps you wishing for something that is probably not meant for you. 

It's probably the emotion that I hate the most. Something that I so desperately wish I will never have to feel ever again. Yet it broke down the high walls around my stone heart again tonight. For the millionth time, it crept into my chest, making me want to believe something good would soon come. 

Most of my emotions have numbed over the past few weeks. Yet the hope scratched at my insides, making me want to believe situations were going to change soon. It bloomed so beautifully inside me, yet it only made me struggle more to breathe. 

Emotions run deeper through my veins lately, yet they have only become harder and harder to understand. They used to make sense once upon a time. They had meanings that were easy to deduct. Now they just pass through my heart mercilessly, torturing me for a reason I don’t even understand. 

These days, I tell the world I don’t feel anything. Whether happiness or sadness, nothing affects me any more. But it’s difficult to believe my own words now. Maybe the emotions are so heavy on my chest that they have numbed me. Making me believe I can’t feel them because they are just too much for me to handle. 

Hope recently has become impossible to feel almost. It’s not every day that a smile comes to my face unknowingly as I think about those possibilities. It was easier for those to bubble inside of me and crossed those walls around my heart. But it wasn’t as often as it once used to be nowadays. 

I didn’t know how to feel about the absence of hope in my life. I lived a miserable life before I felt hope for the first time. Even when I lost it, life went right back to being miserable only. A part of me was now used to the misery. Anyway, when I had hope, a part of me still expected misery. 

I grow attached to people quite rapidly. My mother used to say that I trust too easily. I allowed anyone who showed me love to destroy me. I was always naive enough to give my love to anyone who gave me the illusion of happiness. Anyone who promised to stay by my side with a smile. 

So for someone like me, hope was a familiar daemon. It was a regular guest on the gate of my heart that claimed to be haunted. Though I said that I needed no one to live with, I always hoped someone would offer to be there for me. Hope made me helpless, thus it was simple for me to hate that emotion with everything in me. 

People called me hopelessly romantic. A person who believed in forever and happy endings and everything in-between. And I remember once being in love with those childish concepts. But now it's hard for me to hope for anything good. 

I say I don’t hope for anything anymore, but deep down inside me, I know how false that statement really is. Every day, I hoped for one or the other thing. Sometimes I hoped for silence, other days I hoped people would just talk. Some days I hoped for death to come, other days I just hoped I had one more day to live. 

Maybe it was the bipolar part of me. Or maybe hope really had that strong of a grip over me. But you would never find me admit that hope had control over me. 

It’s easier to understand now when hope sneaks into my chest. Those unknown feelings take over my entire being. That ridiculous smile threatens to cover my frown. My mood automatically gets better and suddenly I wish to live more. And every time I see those signs, I hate myself more and more. 

I didn’t want to hope anymore. I don’t want to let something so stupid like hope ruin the life that I lived. My life already was messed up enough. I don’t want hope to ruin it again and again anymore. 

Yet a part of me knows. A part of me that I wish didn’t exist knew that hope would always be here. It would always crawl its way into my heart and ruin me. 

Humans put hope on such a high pedestal. They say you can live without water and air, but without hope, you won’t survive for even a second. But no one talks about how hope kills you in small doses. Little by little until you no longer have the strength to hope for anything. 

I wish I could also pretend that hope was a positive emotion. Maybe it wasn’t as negative as I believed it was. But at least in my eyes, there was no way in hell it was anything positive as well. Because something positive could never hurt as hope did. 

For every little ray of hope that I held on to, it felt like taking a small sip of the deadliest poison on this planet. Or like taking a drug that gave temporary happiness, yet was bound to ruin me in the long run. That’s exactly what hoping did anyway. It ruined me every time. A little more easily, a little more effortlessly. 

Some days I hoped for the one I loved to understand me. Some days I hoped my boss would just know that I was already giving my best. On other days I hoped for bigger things. Like a huge apartment to replace this house that we have rented for 10+ years. Or for a ton of money so I could quit this awful job and do something I actually loved. 

I continued to hope for things. Even as bad as I hated this vile emotion, I continued to crave it more and more each day. It’s control over me only grew over time and I hated it.