melancholy musings

I lie in bed, I often lie in bed, and picture lives which are so different to my own. Big lives, quiet lives, lives in busy cities, lives beside crashing waves, lives on shining sunny shores. Anywhere, doing anything. The thrill of wanting a different life quickly snowballs into a horrendous fear that my life is not, and can never be, what I dream another's might be.

A bleak acknowledgement of one's own life; unhelpful, uninspiring, yet unsurprising. Films, books, songs, they all talk of hope and love being powerful driving positive forces which can alter a life-course so drastically that everything you could imagine for your life never lives up to the dazzling reality that is actually your own.

I struggle with hope as a concept, as a tangible effect. I search for it in dark corners of my mind, I look up from the depth in which I drown and desperately wish to see the light break above the surface to reveal hope as a hand reaching down and pulling me up just in time for me to gulp the hopeful, cool, air - fulfilment - into my empty, ragged lungs. Hope is meant to be the symbol of humanity, of what separates being alive from living. Yet how can we rely on a symbol that only comes from those who are hopeful? Hope is caught through inspiration, yet instead some of us catch a festering version of hope. If there is no one to nurture hope, hope is left to fend for itself. It becomes so weak that it is eventually only a mask and its substance is false and replaced with resentment and fear. Hope, without its counterpart; a better future, is only wishful thinking, and makes a mockery of life's uncertain trajectory.

Love. Love has, as it has for many before me, only taught me pain. I love to love. I love fully, selflessly and with full respect of its heart-breaking brevity. It can come and go as easily as a warm breeze slipping between linen curtains. Regardless, every time that warm air touches my face, my skin, my heart, it scalds like steam and leaves a burning scar. In time, the scar heals, it always does, but the light, tarnished, skin left behind always remains. It remains as a heavy burden and reminder that once again I am in pain. Every scar weighs me down, pushing me further into the dark, hopeless depths.

One day love won't leave a scar.

One day hope will stop festering inside me like a wound.

One day I will not need a hand to pull me up.

It may take many days, but I will learn how to climb the walls of the depths. I will be the one to nurture my own hope and use it to break through the surface and begin to breathe the changing airs of life.

That is the hope I cling to. Not a shining star guiding me to a new destination, not a band of trumpets serenading a new dawn, not even a dim light between the cracks of a stone wall. The etchings, teachings, of people; hundreds, thousands, millions of ordinary people, who have lived a life and somehow got through it, scars and all. I will arrive whichever pearly gates will greet me and search for the faces of every other person who lived, died, existed and thrived. They made it to the end of their journey. We don't need hope to reassure us we will make it to the end of the journey. We just have to ride it out.