Hope

     What is hope?  The thought that things might get better if you just hold out long enough?  The act of blindly clinging to something that is unlikely to be?  Humanity's saving grace?  Or its greatest flaw?  Pep talks throughout the ages have told us not to give up hope, but why not?  Having hope just opens you up to more hurt, a kind of hurt that you're to blame for, because despite all reason, you let it in.  Of course, hope never seems to care for reason anyway.  The very nature of hope is that it represents a slim chance, something that probably will never happen.  Hope, according to all the laws of chaos that govern the universe, will always hurt more than it helps.  So why do we feel this senseless emotion?  Why have all of these millions of years of evolution, or divine intervention, or whatever selected this trait to be carried forward by life?  I can't say.  But the best theory that I've been able to come up with is that its hope that lets us carry on.  All that stands between us and the fetal position is the hope that somehow, farther down the road, things will get better.

     Now, maybe hope is just some life preserver thrown to us by evolution, to keep us afloat just long enough to pass on our genes and continue the careless, unfeeling cycle.  And part of me believes this, and is telling the rest of me to believe it, too.  "Look at the facts," its saying.  "You've been hurt, and if you keep going down this road, it'll only happen again.  Stop now."  And yet the other part of me just ignores it, and keeps going along, and getting beaten down, and getting back up and continuing.  Reason has failed me, here.  So I'm going to stick to the next best thing that I have: that damned stupid, bloody unreasonable, hopeful part of me.

     So, really, what I'm trying to say is, it's not your fault, and I'm sorry.