What if 'to be continued' was actually the end? The end of the story. What if there was no more? Like the way we go to sleep one night thinking there is a 'to be continued' subtitle to life, that our story continues to next day. What if we don't wake up?
If. If. IF. Everything somehow rotated around this phantom of hope. I didn't want to wake up. I wanted to be able to hope that somehow magically, if I closed my eyes, the pain, the aches, the broken pieces, everything would somehow float up and away, along with my soul, and that when the cold morning light finally broke, I wouldn't wake up. The catch was that I had given up on hope and somehow hope just stuck to me irritably; a pesky piece of Velcro that no matter how much I shook it, it would detach only to stick again only stronger, and the more I fought it, the more I clung onto the hope that hope would let me go.
It stuck to me almost noticeably. I was exhausted with fighting it. If I ventured out, I was self-consciously certain that everyone was stare at the big swollen hope that had made itself at home on me, like a parasite - how could they miss it? I couldn't cover it up. If I tried to sit on it, I found myself floating on this balloon of hope, if I tried to stick it under my sweater, I looked like I was pregnant. Pregnant with hope.
How was it possible to be accompanied with hope and be so firmly entrenched in the deepest pits of despair? The irony did not escape me even when I was holding myself close, recounting ways of escaping life itself. Hope was a reminder. It let everything in the crack in the window, and suddenly it was frigid inside, everything frozen and everything so immeasurably brittle that all it took was one breath, and everything was breaking, everything was falling, everything was shattered. Hope just kept stabbing at you and making your wounds open and reopen, and wouldn't let you heal. Wasn't hope supposed to be healing?
I wanted to heal, I didn't want to heal. I didn't want to want. I wanted to be so completely numb that I couldn't tell if I was numb or not. I wanted to be the brittle ice that was ready to break and never come together again. I was that already, but why was I able to feel every single shard of myself even as far it had fallen off from me?
I didn't want to feel. I didn't want to be. I didn't want to. Life was all a stage. We were all pretending anyway. No matter how much we felt things from our hearts, or felt that life was a journey that was joyous or full of hope, we were all pretending. From the time we were children, isn't this what we learnt? Playing cops and robbers, doctor-patient, indians and cowboys. We were all conditioned to pretend, to grow up and keep pretending. We were all just an army of moving mouths, an elaborate play with our scripts coming to mind from a playwright unseen. You either know your part or you don't. When you forget your lines - then what?
