make hope.

I've lost myself these days. I feel my soul drifting farther and farther away from everything around me, falling silently into a fog that thickens every day. I'm not sure what to blame it on really. So much has happened in these last four months that it's hard to place the blame. All I know is that I woke up today and felt like a shadow of myself, and I'm not sure how to get back to living.

It's different than the depression that I've experienced in the past. I'm less surprised by the feeling, black and sticky and suffocating like always. I don't feel panicked by it, I'm not fighting. In fact I think I've given up. Lost hope. And it's not that I don't believe there is hope to be found, it's just that I'm too tired to find it. To go looking for it, because sometimes it's so damn hard to find. I've given up the battle and I'm too weary to even wave the white flag of peace.

So I lay down, and stare at the world as it passes me by.

Sometimes, I miss who I was. I look back at the two years I had before here, and I see such joy, such ambition. Even as I moved to New York, I felt a passion and a promise that I was where I was supposed to be.

Then the universe met my belief with a resounding knock-out that left me face down and heartless. The hope that I had splattered the walls around me, dripping down and drying out, the last reserve of what was left. And so I died. Inside and out, as everything within and around me became grey and lifeless.

So I walked in this fog, seeing but not feeling, taking in but not touching. And what I saw did not move me, but left me paralyzed instead. I stopped engaging, because to engage meant to hurt. It meant I had to reconcile and change, it meant I had to work. And I did not think that I could work to watch one more thing fail, to see one more loss in my life.

Because to lose what you have worked so hard to keep is like losing air to breathe as you drown--you see it happening yet you can't do anything to change it, watching all you love go to waste as you die.

But the thing about life is we only have two choices--to succumb to the waves or find a way to stay afloat. It's not about whether we live or die--that's all relative. It's whether we are choosing to swim or not--whether we choose to move forward towards land no matter how dismal the chances we will make it may seem. Because either way we are going to die--but I want to die living.

People often tell me I have a pretty smile. It's a nice compliment, and I try to take it gracefully. Most people don't know that I have nine cavities. I went for twenty-three years of my life never having one, and then somehow managed to gain almost a dozen in one visit. I still to this day wonder whether or not the dentist was a liar--seeing damage where there actually was none. I should have gotten a second opinion. But the fact is I didn't, and now I live with nine metal fillings that will one day lead to what I am sure to be a full set of dentures. But none the less I take the compliment and smile anyway because really that's all there is to do.

And isn't life like that sometimes?  We smile even though it's not real. We want to pretend and play along with others, so we do what we need to get through the pleasantries. But inside we are screaming, gasping for air. Asking anyone to save us, to make us feel anything. To lift the fog and pump blood back into our veins, to shatter our paralyzed features and warm our souls once again.

But no one else can do that for us. Only we can.

And we will. Because when we are all alone in the middle of the deepest waters, we remember what we are made of. We find the strength to move forward in the shadowed corners of our being, and we begin to swim again. And while we aren't sure if we'll make it and don't know what we'll find once we arrive, we will know that we did not waste our living. We did not throw away our precious breaths or still our beating hearts willingly.

We made hope where there was none, and let it be the anchor for our souls.

And thus we believed once again.