Posted by yz on Wednesday, May 09, 2007 in

Wishing and Hoping

Hope is frightening. You’re basically putting your whole soul out there, crossing your fingers and praying it doesn’t return in microscopic pieces. It has no boundaries, it can be this immense hope that just fills you until you feel like you’re drowning or it can be almost inconsequential, a piece of fluff on your shirt just beyond your sight.

But you’re never free of it. The very minute someone realizes you’ve been conceived, boom! Here comes the hope. Your mother hopes you’ll come out as whatever is normal in your society, maybe five fingers on each hand, one head. Your father hopes you won’t completely ruin your mum’s figure. As the information of your imminent arrival spreads, the hope increases. Grandparents hope you’ll be everything your parents failed to be, siblings hope you’ll be the perfect playmate, or failing that maybe you’ll be given up for adoption, aunts, uncles, even the head of state needs you to be born so he can say the fertility rate’s steadily increasing. And then you’re finally born and the hope just keeps escalating, as teachers pile on theirs, friends pile on theirs, even your pet is hoping you won’t forget to feed him again. And last but not definitely not least, your hopes. These are the most complicated. Why? Because they take everyone else’s hopes for you, add your own wishes, twist them into unrecognizable shapes, create a labyrinth that Theseus couldn’t get through even if Ariadne gave him ten balls of magic thread and then present it (Abracadabra!) as a life you think you want.

Sometimes you attempt to achieve these hopes, sometimes you don’t. Luckily, all hopes have expiry dates. Like for example, eventually your parents give up hoping you’ll stop wetting the bed and just start purchasing adult diapers. Like that. These expiry dates keep you from having too many hopes. That way you have the normal amount, enough to consider suicide but not enough to actually do it. Depressing? Wait, there’s a silver lining in this storm cloud of Hurricane Katrina proportions, hope ends, eventually, when you have been wholly forgotten, when even your tombstone has decomposed to dirt and your body became unrefined oil centuries earlier…..Then and only then will you be free. That has to be a silver lining, if you can wait that long.

Yes, I know hope can be a good thing, pretty butterflies floating away on a cool breeze during an incandescent sunset while the lake shimmers in the distance, yes I know hope can be that. But right now I am not feeling especially friendly towards hope. What I feel is what you taste when you bite into an entuula (what’s the English word?).

……Is it obvious that I am in the midst of reconstructing my soul, microscope in one hand and super glue in the other? ………