You’re Gonna Love It–Hope

Hope sat next to me on a train. She was only a girl, only a brisk smile. She stepped onto the train with such confidence that I didn’t even question her reason for traveling until too late. Selfish, I guess, that I assumed her an important role to my own life. Sorry, I wanted to say. Hope sat next to me on the train and explained that she was nine, that she was a girl, and that it was important. She made me consider the whimsy of the facts that construct my person.

I asked Hope where her parents were and she explained to me that she didn’t bother with those stories. Sorry. She told me she didn’t bother with sorries, either. Sorry. Sorry! I am apologetic. I am also eighteen, I am a girl, and that is important. I am at school, I listen to music, and none of these things are uninteresting. The facts about me don’t have to bore you. I want to take pride in the things that are obvious, and renounce the eager consumption of my dark secrets. Maybe the revelations of my distress do not bring us together. Maybe, like with Hope, we can bond over niceties and plain things and you do not need to know the stories that plague me to know me better.

Hope likes leaves on trees and water from ice cold bottles. She likes to sing and skip and sometimes leave home. I tell her I like warm cookies and museums. What a breath of fresh air, I think, to talk to someone who drinks up my mundane like something truly new and alive. Who still looks out the window with fresh eyes. Hope is standing now while I am sitting and I tell her don’t go yet, I’m not ready, and she says Sorry. Sorry, sorry sorries, but I don’t need them. I can see her slouch everytime she takes a breath to confess her condolences, her tendency to leave, and she shrinks back down till she’s sat.

I tell her that she’s taller and safer without apologies to carry. That she glows and reflects brighter, like a spring leaf on a budding tree, like condensation on a plastic restaurant cup. I’ve been nurtured, and I’ve been observed, and now, I release a burden from my spine. For Hope, I carry myself without Sorries.