Hope is the Thing with Feathers

It's amazing how quickly hope can die. There it is one minute burning bright as a bulb heating up and firing my creative oven, and the next dead or dying in twilight. When hope dies, everything dies. I don't know how to resuscitate it, bring it back from the dead. When hope breathes its last breath, I don't know how to laugh anymore. I don't know how to make terrible things into a joke. I don't know how to be jolly about that which should be forcing me to my knees in wailing anguish.

I hate watching things die; especially people.

"What is a worse thing? Dying suddenly or knowing you are going to die soon?"

"Well when you know, you get to say goodbye. But when you don't know, you don't have to be afraid."

I'd rather not be afraid.

I feel guilty about never visiting my sister's grave. I convinced her to have one. We were having tea in my father's kitchen casually discussing plans for her funeral. I insisted on having a place for her to be after her mortal body was gone. She relented. I hardly ever fucking go.

The first time I went it was just strange. Standing there by her grave wondering what the hell to say, what the hell to do. It was her birthday. My dad knelt down. He had a little brush in his hand. And he started cleaning the dirt out of the letters on her tombstone.

Is that what hope is? The swish of a little brush on granite. The unfounded belief that we have the power to make everything okay. Nothing is fucking okay. But maybe that's the secret. You keep hope alive by pretending it isn't dead. And in that little delusion, survival is possible. Our souls take flight on a lie and cling to the irrational possibility that the idea of us is a permanent fixture in a random universe. "Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul" - Emily Dickinson