The Picture of Hope

Have you ever thought about why some people can’t love? Why they are happy with sitting by themselves and living alone while the rest of the world is out there falling in love? Well, I think you should know something. We aren’t happy while we sit at home alone. We are not content with living out our lives by ourselves with no one to share our feelings with and nobody to lean on during those hard times that only that special someone could understand. We just aren’t. Hope would be the key word in this world and story and time. Hope is what we loners lack in life. We have lost it all and we have none left to give. We are just so lost in this world that we cant understand why God would put us here in the first place? Why would he condemn us to suffer when he supposedly loves us all with such a fierce, burning passion that it burns? Yes, it burns. It burns me and everyone like me.1

I used to think that life was amazing. That every breath you took was something that was worth living for and every moment that passed you by was something you would never get back. Now, all I believe is that life and love are two very painful things. You can’t have one without the other and that makes it so much worse. The pain magnifies as the love decreases and you don’t want that pain to be anymore. You just want all of it to end so that you won’t have to agonize over it anymore. 2

When I first lost hope, I used to think about it a lot. I used to wonder why all of the things that had happened over the years had to have happened to me. Why was I being punished for living? Was this the price I had to pay for having 24 beautiful years of life and love? And then I just stopped caring. As the last shred of hope disappeared, my life went right along with it. So did my reason. I had no reasons left for why I was living this life so filled with pain and torture and agonizingly long days. There was no other excuse for what I was doing and as I tried to come up with one the pain just grew even more intense.3

It hurt to think, to feel, to breath. It especially hurt to love. And I wasn’t doing much of that anymore so it really didn’t make a whole lot of difference to me. I came to welcome the pain. I welcomed the blackness and the unknowingness that it brought because I didn’t want to have to feel what everyone else felt. That hurt worse than my own pain. 4

The last thing to go was probably my sanity. Yes, that was the last thing. It must not have gone too far if I still have enough to write this. I lost all of my friends because of that last one. They felt horrible for my pain but I couldn’t tell them that it was my fault. It was my pain and it was mine to deal with, not theirs. They wouldn’t listen to reason. Kind of like me, right? But one of my friends stuck around. She stayed with me even when I didn’t want her to be with me. Even when I begged her to leave me and let me wallow in self pity. She just wouldn’t go. She stayed with me and she never left my side. Well, figuratively speaking. She had to leave sometimes to do normal stuff like go to work and sleep. And date.5

That was the hardest thing. When she left me to go and date. I mean, wasn’t that the reason why I was the way I was? Because of love? Because of the false love that so many guys had shown me. Not one had had any true feelings for me. Not one. Isn’t that a little sad? But she dated this one guy who seemed nice enough. I knew different. All of them seem nice until they don’t get what they want when they want it. And I never gave it to them so they always showed me their true selves and I always ended up hurt. It never seemed like a very fair system to me. *Shrug*6

Then my friend tells me that she is getting married. Married, did you say? Yes, married. That is when everything crashed. All of it just fell to the ground and shattered into a million shards right before my wide eyes. I couldn’t stop it. Hell, I didn’t want to. I wanted it to end right then and there. God, take me away! Take me from this body and put me somewhere less painful, please? I need a vacation from all of this! God, please? I can’t take it anymore!7

That was the end of that life. I arrived at a whole different level f pain after that day. The stabs were sharper and deeper and the burning was so much fiercer. The fire stayed, too. It never left my skin. It was a constant battle just to keep it bearable and under control. I had to focus on it all of the time and if my focus wavered, it burned worse. So I tried not to think about anything else anymore. I didn’t like this pain like I liked the other one. It wasn’t a good pain like before so I tried to stay focused as best as I could. I couldn’t always be, though. So I suffered the consequences of my wavering mind.8

My friend got married a year later. Well, she said it was a year later. I couldn’t tell anymore. Time moved different in the dark abyss I lived in at that point. I had no real sense of time anymore. So she got married to the hated kind and I was still alone in my own little hell. She would bring that thing over and I would look at them together. It was a strange feeling I got when I saw him look at her and her look at him. It was almost as if I was warming from the inside out. At first I thought it was the fire, burning hotter at the sight of a false feeling. But then I knew better. It was what I had thought had disappeared forever. What I thought would be impossible to get back after all of the disappoint in my “life”. 9

Hope. I felt hope as I looked at them. A hope that I hadn’t felt in so long. I welcomed the new feeling with every particle of my being. I welcomed the warmth that was always there when I saw them together and I longed for warmth that came from someone looking at me. I wanted a man to look at me the way he looked at my friend. 10

Have you ever lost your hope? Have you ever looked at something beautiful and felt nothing? You knew that someday that thing could die and that is all you would think about? I used to feel that way. I still do. Sometimes, though, not all of the time like before. My world doesn’t revolve around the pain and agony anymore. Now it revolves around that one picture. What picture, you ask? Well, I will tell you. The picture of my friend and her one true love. The picture of Hope.11