These Days

Hope feels different these days. 

It seems disappointment crushes my head 

Like waves when you’re out too far to feel sand under your feet anymore

Crashing over and over and over and-

Desperate for a breath between the forces

shoving you breathless beneath

caught between sobs and a heaving chest and efforts to blurt out words too empty to explain what’s really going on

I feel like a prisoner to hope these days. 

I wish I could lower my expectations, tap out. 

Crawl out of the ocean and lay on the shore.

Need less, want less, eat less, be less.

If I were smaller… less full of wishing and dreams, appetite, desire, lust. 

Maybe then my disappointment would stay on the horizon

Maybe I could come out of this unaffected. 

Hope is so particular these days- 

We crave what what we don’t have. 

It’s not wrong. 

We can’t escape it. 

I remember days long passed, an 11-year-old girl, 

Writing a card for a boy that made my heart flutter.

I felt small, silly, insignificant. My tiny innocent heart already knew asking for love would be met with shame. 

Yes, shame, existing in the midst of hope.

I told my mother I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

“It’s impossible, sweet girl. They already are”

They were.

I cried with sympathy for my own heart, knowing it would likely be disappointed.

I cried because even still, I would choose hope.

Crocodile tears sunk down my cheeks then,

They seem even heavier today.

My hopes are up, these days.

If we don’t choose them, where will they go? 

How will these minuscule rays of light find a way through closed curtains?

Where will our tender selves find a breath if we refuse to come up for air?

My hopes are up. 

I anticipate another soul-wrenching disappointment.

They float higher. 

It’s exhausting, truly, to hope like this. 

But people like us… 

Hopers.

Humans.

We don’t really have a choice do we? 

Today I’m hoping for home.

Screens and billboards and banners and posts telling us to stay there.

Many of us finding ourselves in places that we want to run from. 

foreign feeling, even. 

Many of us being forced to transition, even as voices invade our ears screaming to hunker down. 

Many of us will get up, put on a uniform and go stock shelves. 

Many of us will put on scrubs and sooth worried, fighting souls. 

Many of us will pack our things, once again 

drive away, once again, 

from places that held promise to places that may feel like home soon - we hope. 

Many of us, humans. 

These days, we hope.