Where there is hope...

Hope, in its youth, was always associated with a sense of discomfort for me, its anticipatory nature unable to clasp onto the firm parts inside of me and thus always fluttering, flitting, dancing, to the fading tides and currents of my experience. Despite the uneasy feeling of not-knowing that it could sometimes leave in the pit of my stomach, I miss the hope that was both friend and foe in my earlier days. Because behind the cloud of uncertainty that it always seemed to leave in its wake, hope was still, in our youth, "a thing with feathers", as Emily Dickinson so poetically wrote.

Sadly, the older we become, the more realities come to shake us and snap us out of the reveries that we so indulgently partook in as children. Now, there is no time for the stars to twinkle, no time, even, for the stars. There is no time for the crossing of fingers or the lexical ordering of dreams of success from point A to point D (A for attorney and D for designer, interior designer, maybe). No time for interpreting the clouds and inventing kingdoms in the sky, and definitely no time for the sweet aroma of cookies or the bitter taste of a solitary raindrop on the tongue, for our senses are always searching, pushing, forcing, against imagination and fancy to make room for the proper precedence of the Here and the Now.

Lately, there is a particularly frightening pressure building up inside of me that sometimes takes me unaware, like the roar of the tide that sweeps us under and continues to ring in our ears even after we surface. It's the pressure of Responsibility, the responsibility that comes hand in hand with the question, "What are you going to do with your life?" Ironically, it's a question that's easy enough to answer in childhood, when so many dreams have yet to be extinguished or forgotten, but infinitely more difficult to even think of when you're more than halfway "through" with college (but how can you ever be through with something that you never even feel like you properly "started"?). Sometimes, I'm overwhelmed with a frantic sense of forced purpose- I must do this and this and maybe even this (#3 on my list of things to do in order to *not* become a failure)- other times, I can only allow myself to drift in and out of a lackadaisical state that numbs my mind to thinking about that terrifying, looming shadow called The Future that is now in plain sight.

What, then, is so terrifying about The Future? (So terrifying that it must be capitalized and given a title?) Truthfully, I don't really know. Although few would call me rash, the wings of impulse have often taken ahold of me and led me to bursts of this-moment indulgence that rarely (or never, depending on how one wants to look at it) tend to pay off. But not one part of me regrets those moments, because they are still Life in its naked truth. Admittedly, I rue the fact that I'm not a long-distance runner or even a speed-walker on the conventional track to success, but can I honestly say that I would take it all back and begin at the starting line anew? I've given too much, laughed and teared and screamed too much, to look back now and wish for something else. So here I am, 21 years old, scared and uncertain, unknowing about the future but changed from the past, with nothing to guide me but this hope, or whatever you may want to call it, inside of me that promises me brightness and luminosity, if I will only risk falling and give it a chance to sing, a chance to soar into that magic place that is unknown even in my dreams.

...there is life.






by christine at 4:28 PM ©

---