Haven’t I suffered enough? I glower upward at no one in particular. Palms open. Arms splayed. Lying in wait for the reverberating echo from the one who knows.
“No” I hear. Or do I say it?
Why me? I ask, dejected.
“You know why” he sighs in response.
I collect no money as I pass GO.
Why do we ask questions we already know the answers to? Is that how we hope? Is that what hope is? Asking the same question but expecting a different result? At what point does hope become insane?
Chest heaving, breath stinking hot with resentment. Face puffed with fluid. Eyes hating their openness. Gaze unfocused. Unsupported head threatening to roll right off. Neck knotted. Collarbone concaving. Upper-back straining. Stomach gurgling. Skeleton shaking. Hamstrings coiled. Low back jammed. Cinder block legs. Dead weight. Mind cloudy. No pulp. Zero concentrate. Fried. Splat. Desperate but unable to focus on anything else. Heavy fog. Heavy body. Sorry what’s that you said? Saturday afternoon. July the 4th. I glance to the window, thankful the black out curtains are blocking the sun.
Chance. Go back three spaces.
Why do we ask questions we already know the answers to? Is that how we accept? Is that what acceptance is? Knowing the answers but needing to ask anyway?
Earth’s core walks me on a leash. Constantly yanking down. Horizontal, be horizontal. I make my mark on the day by defiantly leaving a spoon in the sink. “You can’t say I didn’t get out of bed.” I roll on to my stomach, releasing my gravitational burden into the mattress. Down. Down. Down. The giant hand presses me into the ground. Sleep. Please let me sleep.
Community Chest. Doctor’s fee. Pay $50.
Asking questions like “why me?” is such a trap because the only satisfying answer is because you deserve it. The real answer of, life is suffering, is so unsatisfying. Like what are you supposed to do with that? “You just have to accept it”. Okay, great. But, like, why me?
I wake up startled and realize I’m at the table again. He slides me a folded piece of paper. “Really? Again?”I ask. He crosses his right leg over his left. His eyes rise to meet mine. He cocks his head to one side, blinking silently. I push off from the table and stride aggressively to the door. “He’ll see.”
4 days good, got it back. Crash. 7 days bad. Building. 3 good days. Slow decline back down. 5 days, bottom. There goes a month. My life has been on pause but somehow it’s still slowly slipping through my fingers. Has it been on pause? Think of all the good you’ve done. Got it. Coasting good, 2 weeks. Over-extended. Dragging. Don’t admit. Smack. Crushed. 6 weeks bad. Not all bad. 60%. No consistency. Guessing game. Is it that bad? Is this bad enough? Believe me. It’s bad. This sucks. I don’t want it to be bad. Push. Feeling feisty, I’m in control. Dragged back. Get back in your place. Nope. Never again. Hope. Disappointment. Solitude. Maybe. Nah. Probably shouldn’t.
I am the race car, doing laps around the board but unable to buy any property.
I’m constantly grieving the body I lost. While trying to appreciate the body I have.
I’m constantly trying to validate my aches and pains. While knowing I have to try to push through.
I constantly want to get rid of it. But know that I can’t.
I’m constantly reminded of my high expectations. While feeling like I’ve already lowered them so much.
I’m constantly trying to just be. While feeling like I have to do so much.
I’m constantly aware of how much I’m capable of. While being trapped in a body attacking itself.
I’m constantly listening to my body. While never liking what it has to say.
I’m constantly blaming myself for how I feel. While knowing that I shouldn’t.
I constantly want to be in control. While knowing I’m anything but.
I’m constantly reminded that tomorrow is never guaranteed. While always having to rest.
I’m constantly trying to put a positive spin. While also trying to accurately portray how much it sucks.
I’m constantly trying to figure everything out. While knowing that I’ll never figure it out. While trying to accept that I don’t have to figure it out.
I’m constantly trying to be okay with everything. While feeling like nothing is okay. While knowing that it doesn’t have to be okay. Okay?
I’m constantly trying not to be sad. While my shelved dreams stare back at me with dusty eyes.
I’m constantly trying not to be angry. While screaming into my pillow.
I’m constantly wanting to be understood. While not having the energy to make people understand. While knowing that nobody will ever fully understand.
I’m constantly trying to be hopeful. While also trying to accept.
I just want to plan my way out of this but would probably have to cancel.
The old man beckons me onto his porch into the chair opposite his. “Nice day we’re having sonny” he says. I look around not having noticed. I tune in and out for the next few minutes as he tells me about the family of robins that frequent his front yard. “What is it you called me up here for?” I finally ask. He smiles at me “no reason”.
Go directly to jail.
What questions like “why me” assume is that there is some grand scoreboard in the sky. Why me reasons that since a lot of bad stuff has happened that certainly something good has to happen next. That I deserve that. But you can’t deserve the good without deserving the bad.
My hands immediately type out something like, “what I didn’t realize was that all the lessons I’ve learned through the struggles is the something good I’ve been looking for”. Because of course I would say something like that.
Fuck hope. Fuck acceptance. I thought these things would sustain me in my struggles. But they’re just more standards I feel like I’m failing to live up to.
Fear, the very thing hope is supposed to dispel, is exactly what feeds it. Hope’s main motivator is fear of the ONE and ONLY thing that is guaranteed to happen to each and everyone one of us. To hope is to delude.
When hope is reduced to its’ pure essence, it’s nothing more than a belief in impermanence. Except we conveniently forget that impermanence cuts both ways. We don’t talk about hope when things are good. No one tells you to be hopeful when things are good because you just are. Part of what makes feeling good so good is the subconscious expectation that it will continue. Good fortune compounds hope.
We only become aware that hope turned into an expectation when we’re disappointed. Misfortune is always a surprise.
Hope is tragic irony. That’s what makes it so important, and so dangerous. When you need it least, you have it. And when you need it most, you don’t.
I come to in a checkout line. I’m sliding my items on to the conveyor belt. He raises one eye-brow, “is this everything?”, he asks, his hands continue to shuffle the items through the scanner. “Yeah I think so” I reply. His eyes shift downward to the side as if he’s getting ready to shrug. “Are you sure?”
You have been elected chairman of the board. Pay each player $50.
Hope becomes insane exactly when it’s the strongest, which is when you let it go. The fear is so strong that the mind will not stay with it. Like when people on their deathbed describe seeing flashes of their loved ones. It goes to somewhere the pain isn’t. The mind knows there is so much pain, but in that moment of letting go, in that moment of hopelessness, it is finally able to tap into the source of the thing it just let go.
Hope is an idea, you see. And ideas are just thoughts. Which, by nature, are impossible to hold on to. It’s like Inception. When you try to access hope you can’t really remember how it got there. And when you look to someone else for hope you will always slightly reject it, because you know it’s not yours. That’s where the “you just gotta have it” comes from. It’s impossible to pinpoint.
The appearance of hope has little to do with why it exists. It exists because all other options have been exhausted. Change is the only thing that’s left. Change is the only thing that ever was.
My doctor walks in and shakes my hand, “how have you been feeling?”. I look down, all of a sudden interested in the roll of white paper I’m seated on. “how do they get it to roll like that….” I navigate the sanitized luminescence to find the check out desk. There he sits, hands folded, sucking on a peppermint. “So three months puts us at…”
I am the thimble. Voted out of its own game.
Nothing makes hope weaker than “just needing to have it”. Hope is shallow when hopelessness is dammed. The bright side is only bright if the dark side is dark.
Hope appears as a bright light but looks more like a flickering bulb. Acceptance appears as an embrace but looks more like shoving off. Hope is perceived as warm and fuzzy, but producing it feels icy and sharp. Acceptance is perceived as being okay with everything, but doing it feels a lot like reluctance and resentment. Holding on to hope is like sliding down a rope ladder with a tight grip. Accepting whatever comes your way feels less like surfing the waves and more like being pummeled by them.
These bright connotations of nice words like hope and acceptance distract us from their very substance. They exist in mutually dependent relationships because we feel like half of life is a problem. Life is miserable. Life is embarrassing. Life is insecurity. Life is pain. Life is disappointment. Life is death. None of the things we do as a result of suffering ever get rid of these truths. The appearance of hope has little to do with why it exists. The perception of acceptance has little to do with how it is done.
I think we have to renounce these ideals we aspire to live up to at some point. If we don’t challenge the standards we set for ourselves then what are we even doing? I’m finding that my honesty about not feeling hopeful or accepting, has oddly made me a little closer to them. That feels like an answer to me at the moment.
In his essay titled “Joy Is Such a Human Madness” from his Book of Delights, Ross Gay meditates on a question one of his students once asked him.
“What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join. And what if the wilderness – perhaps the densest wild in there – thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) – is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s terms, the “intolerable”. It astonishes me sometimes – no, often – how every person I get to know – everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything – lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is – and if we join them -your wild to mine – what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?”
I awake once more to a vision of his table. Except I’m alone this time. I sit down and wait for him to come tell me what to do. An unknowable amount of time passes. “Maybe he’s not coming.” I wait some more. Eventually, I give up, and begin to write.