a certain cruelty to it all

Optimism can thrive only so long as reality is kept at bay. were two ships passing in the night, for a moment conjoined in our journeys, but now going our separate ways, she to her port and me to mine. Half-dead hopes brought to life, the spade taken to the shallow grave where I buried my dreams, and these dreams are exposed to fresh air, and then I’m alone, left to refill the grave before I’m face-to-face with half-rotten monsters wielding nostalgia and remorse as their debilitating weapons.

There’s a certain cruelty to it all.

I can read out of this some sort of reminder—“This is where Home really is.”—but if that’s home, it’s not too homey. It’s an empty home, nothing but bare walls and a shiny finish, void of any life or substance. That old dream—falling in love, sharing my life with a wonderful girl, maybe having a family—is built on assumptions that have shown to be false, assumptions that fail to hold the weight of the world. Naïve convictions about the world which the world chose to brutally expose. Returning to my roots—naivety, ignorance, blissful hoping while refusing to look ‘round ‘bout the world with an honest eye—would be nothing short of a turtle retreating into its shell, shutting out the world as it shuts itself in. And that’s something I can’t do; it’s far better to embrace reality for what it is than to pretend it’s something it’s not. While the latter may be appealing, when reality decks you in the face, it won’t be worth the pain; and the deeper the deception, the deeper the sting.

This is Reality: sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you don’t. Some people experience their dreams; most of us don’t. Some people have an easy life; others must toil day in and day out, with no reward for their work, dying a lonely and miserable death. Death: the one thing holding all of us together, that irrevocable common fate linking us all as one. “Everyone who lives will someday die and die alone.” Between Birth and Death, there is Life: a “bittersweet symphony”, an existence aptly characterized as an evolution of suffering interspersed with fleeting and illusory moments of happiness. We go through this life, and we try to make it through in the best way possible. Some do well, others fail miserably. The shape of our lives isn’t due to Fate but to our own decisions, the decisions of others, chance itself, and—at times—the interventions of God. Black-and-white explanations as to why some people get lucky and others flounder fail to do justice to the evidence, that the rains fall both on the Righteous and on the Wicked. We’ll do no worse than to buy into that religious pop-talk about God orchestrating our lives so that if we’re faithful to him, everything will turn into a rose-garden paradise at the end. Any idea that one’s fortunes in life are determined by their character—Good Folk are blessed, Bad folk are cursed—is simply repackaging the ancient Jewish idea of Torah-Obedience, a simplistic hypothesis that could never move from theory to fact simply because it’s crushed under the siege towers of Real Life (and that’s where we get things like Job and Lamentations, people knowing the theology of Torah-Obedience but seeing, with their own eyes and in their own lives, that it’s inherently flawed). Don’t think that “having Jesus” means you’ll be delivered from all your troubles; sure, it’d be great, but it just doesn’t work that way. Ask the little Sudanese boy, “How has Jesus changed your life?” and he may tell you, “We had someone to pray to after our mom was gang-raped and murdered in front of our eyes.”

Do I love the idea of falling in love with a girl, marrying her and sharing life with her? Yes, absolutely, a resounding YES. But I’m at the point where I don’t hope for it. Hope without expectation isn’t hope, it’s wishful thinking. Hope with an unrealistic expectation is a hope that disappoints, a hope that’s both a host and a parasite: we feed off it in the hellholes of life, and it feeds off us as it drains life from our veins and leaves us emaciated echoes of our former selves. So call my “hope” in this no more than wishful thinking, wanting it to happen—hell, craving it to happen—but not actually expecting it to happen. Sometimes two people meet and the world’s changed, two hearts beating in rhythm and the world peripheral to “us”. But most often such meetings are fleeting: glimpses into a world made new, a world reborn, opening the floodgates to a new reality begging to be explored… but in the end being nothing but a tease and a reminder that this world’s in awful shape and it’s apathetic to our wants and whims.

*SIGH* I really, REALLY want to have hope; I really want to believe that there’s change down the road, new air in my lungs, a new horizon to be admired. But history’s cyclical, disappointment sketched across an ever-revolving canvas, painting a dark portrait whose promise is nothing but uncertainty and disillusionment ‘round every bend and fork in the road. Sometimes it doesn’t matter which road you take: they both go nowhere.