the hope of it all

My issue with writing is that I don’t actually know how to do it—every word I write has to come naturally, phrases forming in my head in the same way feelings flood my chest without hesitation, but I’ve always been able to command language in a way I’ve never been able to control my limbs. I love running because it allows you to be bad at coordination in a way no other sport enables.

I don’t want to write about running, though, because right now my heart aches worse than my lungs have ever burned, yet metaphorically I’m still gasping even if my arms are wrapped around my knees instead of raised up towards the sky and to any potential onlookers I likely appear normal. I make my sentences too long because I talk too fast in my head.

I often wonder if my brain finds connections because they’re present, or because there are only so many thoughts a person can have and relatability is inevitable when you’re borderline obsessive. It’s probably both. I know that I’ve reached a point of exhaustion which sleep cannot solve. I’m tired of hoping, I’m tired of striving, I’m tired of understanding everything and being disappointed by all of it.

I think my father married my mother because he wanted to be better, because she embodies so many of the habits and characteristics he’s always aspired to represent, and perhaps he gave up because he was tired of continuously pursuing an ideal for which he had to work so hard to still not realize. Maybe that’s too harsh of a speculation, but it’s not as if he divorced her in kindness. They were married for over three decades and in my naïveté I can’t understand how she’s still breathing.

I wish you could love people into healing, as self-righteous as that may sound, because while there are people whom I could have loved better, I could not have loved them more. It’s a pain that overwhelms me until all I can feel is emptiness, except emptiness shouldn’t weigh this much.

Sometimes I dig my fingernails into the backs of my hands and hope they draw blood so at least I’ll have proof of my anguish.

Other times it’s to direct the fire flowing through my nerves, burning my skin from within.

I can only scream for so long.

I wish I could be tutored in detaching.

How many times must I break my own heart before my head will finally have had enough?

Yearning is strange, because I sometimes imagine conversations with parents I have never met and I regularly miss versions of my father that no longer exist, renditions he might not have even been in my lifetime, and I still miss you despite knowing better and wanting more because I can’t let people go until they’ve ruined my heart in a way I know you are not capable of. You can be gentle, to a fault, but it’s not a flaw, and maybe that’s the lesson I was meant to learn here—one in kindness, rather than in love, though they should be the same even if one never guarantees the other.

It’s hard to let you go when you’ve already come back so many times, and that’s the explanation I offer when asked why I cannot kill my hope no matter how tightly I crush it between my hands, but while I can lie and tell myself that it’s resilience, that it’s faith, there comes a point when it must be labeled honestly as self-destruction.

Hope must be the only feeling more effective at shattering a person’s soul than love is.

This is why I don’t force myself to write.