Hopelessly Hopeful

It's that time of the night when I sit to unload the squalor of my thoughts on to a pristine paper, thereby tainting it. Must the paper not resent me? There are better things that could have been scribbled on it.

The promise of a better tomorrow, better still, the illusion of it is what drives one today. This tomorrow feeds off the hopes one raises today. Every evening the sun hides, unable to bear upon itself all the burden of hopes one invests it with as it rises. Then the night falls. Enough time for one to recover from the momentary realisation that the perishing of those promises is as inevitable as the rising of the sun the following morning. Also, enough time for one to weave a new tapestry of hopes that one expects life will fulfil. 

One adds a dash of that hope into tea one brews in the morning. One slathers some of that hope with butter on a piece of bread. One pours some of that hope with hot milk into a bowl of porridge. And one opens the newspaper with the hope of finding a possibility of that promise, pressed neatly between the folds of those pages, resembling tiny ants fighting for space, materialising. The newspapers have enough material to demolish all the hopes of having such hopes; and yet one, incurably and hopelessly bitten by the bug of hopefulness keeps hoping.  With the pages of that newspaper the hope gets recycled too. It’s presented to one afresh the next day in a new form, new variety. 

They don’t make a big crashing sound as they perish, these promises. They don’t go all BOOM and BAAM! They just fade away. And fizzle out without much fanfare. A silent death mostly. And then, even before one is done mourning for the lost hopes, new ones start budding and replace the former. And one begins to chase the newly arisen hopes. One knows it’s a bait. Yet one is drawn to it guilelessly and helplessly. Just a certain GPA , a certain degree, a certain job, an apartment with a certain number of rooms in a certain neighbourhood, citizenship of a certain country, a certain person…just this one thing, or that….just this one. And then will commence the gilded age. Does it though? Even if one gets all of these and maybe more?

It’s a Sisyphean task: one tries to claw their way out of this pit, a hopeless pit made of hope, and having come out of it somehow, one finds themselves in an even deeper pit. The pit only multiplies, and one is plunged further into multiple pits simultaneously. Hopeless pits made of hopes.

All of life is this: digging new pits, trying to get out of them, only to envy the pits of the others and wanting to dive into them right away, or to pity the pits of others hoping to never get pushed in those. But a pit is a pit. Hopeless pits made of hopes.

It's that time of the night when I sit to unload the squalor of my thoughts on to a pristine paper, thereby tainting it. Must the paper not resent me? There are better things that could have been scribbled on it.