<\/p>\n
When I was born, my mother decided to curse me by making my middle name Hope. I\u2019ve since had quite some time to gather my opinions on the topic, experiencing 18 (and a half!) years of hope having a chokehold influence on my life.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean to imply that middle names have any sort of tangible connection to the rest of our visceral lives; I\u2019m just a metaphorical person. It\u2019s likely that hope would have defined my life without the name, because hope is born of trauma. Hope is more synonymous with worry than optimism, and those who have the most hope need it most, so they certainly aren\u2019t blessed.<\/p>\n
The lowest points in my life demanded the most hope from me. I learned how to cross my fingers and wish really hard <\/em>that mom and dad would stop fighting, or that the police wouldn\u2019t show up this time. Quickly, this dependence on hope became my permanent state. This hope was devoid of action, therefore unproductive, and generally the most useless form. But it\u2019s also the least dangerous.<\/p>\n Being entirely theoretical, hope is detached from our experienced reality. Therefore, any action taken in accordance with it attempts to rival tangible reality. My earliest recollection of actionable hope was when I became victim to the classic kindergarten plight of getting a block thrown at my face. When I grabbed my nose and winced, my palms became immersed in a scarlet river, which dripped down to infect my shirt. Escorted to the nurse, I was given a note for my parents, a clean shirt, and a plastic bag with my old one. As the bus doors pulled themselves open at my stop, my stomach sank with the image of the way my parents would react in disdain to the note, or dramatize the destruction of the robin\u2019s egg fabric of my shirt. Walking home, I hoped for a reality where they never found out, creating an ideal but ultimately unachievable option. I began running home. Taking action to indulge my hope, I tore up the note, and shoved the plastic bag into the depths of my closet.<\/p>\n The danger of acting on hopeful impulse this way is that it can rival integrity. As young as I was, I had intended to never tell a lie or hide things, yet, that hopeful force alone drove me to act differently.<\/p>\n As someone so practiced with having to hope, I found myself drawn to people with a lot to hope for. Whether they weren\u2019t quite the kindest person, had a nasty habit they\u2019d been meaning to kick, or some other fallacy I was convinced I could solve. It began to poison my friendships and relationships.<\/p>\n Befriending the popular girl with a weed habit and undesirable boyfriends was a notable example of my attraction to these individuals. I had turned 15 in the back of a red Toyota Corolla that had passed that age itself about 50,000 miles ago. I invited her to sleepover thinking that I could make Disney movies and a trundle bed satisfy her, but as I watched weary street lights gleam in the midnight light, I realized that it never would. It was my first time sneaking out. We latched the backdoor behind us, and stealth wasn\u2019t a factor since she was well aware that my mom was deaf. I perched myself awkwardly next to her and the Corolla driver on a couch in his backyard shed, watching the smoke from their weed crawl from their nostrils and feeling like I wanted to be anywhere but here. I still held a space for her to make any sort of redemption, even as she apologized hastily before disappearing into the driver\u2019s dark bedroom in the house I could faintly make out through the shed window. In holding so much hope for her, I lost sight of the honor roll student, marching band member, cello player whose birthday it was.<\/p>\n Hope isn\u2019t innately negative, it\u2019s just not the same thing as optimism. Holding onto it can be so difficult, if not damaging. Pertaining solely to the theoretical, it has no material implications. But that\u2019s what makes it so addictive. We get to hold on to a reality that allows us to detach from the one we know. Instead of being a perfectionist, no-do-wrong, honor roll student, for a night I got to be someone else. I\u2019m still not quite sure if I had longed for her to be more like me, or me her, but it took me away from my known existence for one night.<\/p>\n The tumultuous moments of my young life resulted in an addiction to dramatic push and pull, especially when it came to my mother. One time when she was fighting with my dad, she dumped her glass of ice water over his head. She must\u2019ve lost her grip on the glass, because it shattered down the center hallway. Shards of glass ricocheted like an explosion of expressionless love, living room to kitchen, and I sat on the floor with my dad while we picked them up. What I had remembered most vividly about that night was the way they laughed afterwards, and the grip she had on his arm. My parents had been so in love, unfortunately just not while I was alive.<\/p>\n In the peaceful moments of my childhood, I had longed for so little. My childhood summers were nothing extravagant, they didn\u2019t include camps or vacations or beaches. In fact, most of my summer was spent sitting out too long on the black pavement of the driveway, my body\u2019s sticky shadow left behind with the chalk remains when I\u2019d be pulled back into the air conditioning after beginning to glow a bright red. There was nothing more to the experience than hop-scotch outlines and listening to the way the world hums with all the neighbors\u2019 lawn mowers churning. There was nothing more or less to hope for.<\/p>\n It\u2019s likely that hoping for happiness may be the very thing that\u2019s stopping us from achieving it. If you have to hope that the glass is half full, you don\u2019t\u00a0 believe undoubtedly that it is. After my tumultuous childhood, I had hoped for a peaceful adolescence. But in my hope, I had assumed its impossibility. The impossibility of peace then became my defining force.<\/p>\n I began to search for peace while pursuing chaos. I got a nice boyfriend, but in a long distance relationship. I paced my love in short visits and gave my tears to him in envelopes in train station parking lots. I spent every moment we shared together hoping that we could share it forever, so much so that I forgot to share them with him. I didn\u2019t want to tell my mother about him, so I\u2019d come up with elaborate lies to justify my disappearance for the weekend. He\u2019d miss flights and I\u2019d spend the day waiting for him, wanting to feel important enough that he\u2019d leave on time for the next trip. I\u2019d spend these days alone, since I had already \u201cdisappeared\u201d. Roaming grocery stores and driving around aimlessly within 15 miles of my house, so I\u2019d always know the way home. It was ritualistic and comforting. Such a pleasing way to wander, while knowing that I wasn\u2019t just hoping to see him anymore, but my hopes were in the process of being fulfilled. I could find nothing else to hope for in these moments. It was serene to simply fixate on the feeling of anticipation.<\/p>\n One reunion, I was waiting on the wrong side of the tracks. I waved to his back as he exited the train, chasing after him with a heavy persistence. I filed down the stairs and under the bridge to cross the tracks, watching his figure grow more distant from mine. I didn\u2019t smile when I saw him. I didn\u2019t smile until his eyes met mine. Still, he didn\u2019t see me.<\/p>\n The most notable of our reunions, however, had to have been the last of them. After a 3 AM text that he had left his house for the ten hour car trek, I once again began my day of waiting. This day, though, wasn\u2019t aimless. It was filled with the purchasing of tupperware and pots and pans, dusting of all the surfaces and cleaning of all the crevices in order to welcome him to his new home\u2013our new home. I felt so complete when I finally saw his car crawl up to the curb outside, packed with all his hidden secrets and bad habits that I could ignore for long enough to hang my body on his. And in that moment, the chaos came to a close. The push and pull of longing and anticipation ceased. I had what I had hoped for; I could no longer feed my addiction of hoping and not having. With every box we carried in, I left behind pieces of hopeful delusion I had made this \u201clove\u201d out to be. I unpacked his baggage with hands that cared too much about his fingers never lifting. Once all the boxes were barren, and the truth about what I had was blatantly laid out, there was nothing left to put my faith in.<\/p>\n Hope does not command any sort of resolution. When my ability to hope had disappeared, I didn\u2019t feel the happiness I had anticipated. I wanted to drag myself back to my wandering car rides and grocery store waiting rooms. I wanted to be able to seal my tears with goodbyes in envelopes and leave the train station parking lot behind until the next time we got to say hello.<\/p>\n Without my contribution of beautiful hope, he was starkly adjourned from the almighty being I had perceived him to be. Often, I still long to visit those moments I shared with him again, but I realize now they don\u2019t exist on their own.<\/p>\n Hope is infectious and dangerous; it drives us to our very limits and then pulls away just long enough for us to question who we are. I think, though, that hope colors in the bare spots between the leaves on tree branches. It populates interviews, first dates, and movie trailers; it creates a, sometimes utterly unachievable, conditional clause for emotion. Soundly grounding itself between your truest terrors and truest bliss, it is the most vulnerable expression of integrity. A beast that, if left untamed, will dictate this integrity instead of displaying it.\u00a0 I sit firmly on the crossroads of hoping to never hope again, and hoping I will forever have hope.<\/p>\n
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