This week consisted of tiny victories in which I felt the weight I carried, like Atlas carries the Earth, lighten. This week I felt light enough to lose my sense and sing until my throat went raw. I felt light enough to sit atop a fire escape, absent of responsibilities, and watch a soft golden sky turn periwinkle, then black.
This lightness is a personal highpoint after months of consistent lows of barely holding it together. I live with a perpetual dual citizenship in the countries of Breaking Down and Putting Back Together and I finally found myself at home in the latter. This feeling can be described as many things; relief, a well-deserved break, the calm before the storm. But I want to call it hope, for lack of better clichés. This week, when someone asked me how I’m doing, I was finally able to say with confident honesty, “Everything’s fine”, because for this sweet moment, everything is. It’s temporary in all ways a calm before a storm is, but it’s different. This moment, or these moments are entities in itself. These moments of positive happenings after positive happenings are special, they’re gifts and they’re filled with promise.
Hope is a strange feeling. The coquette gets a bad reputation for her fleeting comfort before she slips through one’s fingertips, unknown when she will return. It’s difficult to keep her close. Hope is intoxicating, so alluring as she gives you a sip of what getting better tastes like, then prances away. You’re left with a bad aftertaste.
This week has taught me that the liquor of hope is one that hurts to taste only once. You want to hold onto that taste forever because you don’t know if you’ll ever get it back. You have no idea if this hope, this lovely vixen of emotion, will prove itself as more. Under the relief, you frantically pray that she stays, just for a while longer.
I had two options after the end of this week. I could savour that one taste of hope and believe that I will taste her once more. Or, I could shove her away because something so beautiful could never be truly mine. Humans are made to endure hardship, and hope, beauteous hope, was never meant to last the night.
I basked in hope today. I felt her comfort and tasted her sweet liquor and I was drunk on it. I was drunk on hope.
Maybe she will favour me and come back sometime soon. As she drifts away like cigarette smoke, the daunting ticking clock of exams, finals, summer, I hold that taste close to my heart, that hope can be ugly, and it can be flawed. I am the same. Maybe next week I’ll be in an awful place again, next week maybe I’ll reside in the country of Breaking Down, but for now, I bask in the echoes of joy and a soft golden sky.
