If there is one thing

If there is one thing that keeps a human being alive

it is belief.

or said differently: hope.

it is hardly evidence. hardly even experience.

Belief is why we wake up everyday, the hope of some good outcome, prolonged or immediate,

it is why we enjoy meeting new attractive people, if we are single or not single,

it is why we so easily remember their names and forget the names of plane looking people,

that some unsaid unimagined unthought connection will grow into something unthought

but always imagined,

or it is why we make status updates: the hope of being noticed and affirmed

it is why we blog: the hope of being read, and someone finding the

tiny personal single life we live to be, in some small way, important,

which of course to us is hugely important,

even if no one ever ever reads it, or we get the rare affirmation,

that one affirmation gives birth, sets free, our lustful imagination

for all that could be reading it.

or even our journals, those secret things that shall never be read,

how few of us would burn those books,

how few of us write to write,

without the hope that someone in the future might stumble across it

and find that we said something,

or even the sexy thought that someone has found us interesting

and tip-toed into our room, glanced over their shoulder,

and read without us knowing.

and in so hoping, we bait hope for hope,

if we win, and someone does affirm us or notice we are breathing,

they too are hoping, they are attracted to us and want to understand,

to consume and be better,

or to know us, study us, grasp us, and win us. It is an exchange, and when even

it is perhaps what Love is, a type of Love, but it is

not always even... and so we find unrequited hope, which is heartbreak, which

is defeated belief.

I believe humans hope for such things, because we are unfulfilled

and therefore hungry. We hope for dinner and hope for a spouse and

hope for children and hope to retire and hope our children love us and hope

to make them love us right and hope to be healthy and hope for heaven so that

we have something else to hope for when what we hoped for wasn't what we wanted

and then we grow tired, and the desire starts to be tired, and we stop laughing,

and so many lose their faces.

I sound like I'm critiquing. But the alternative is nirvana, freedom from desire,

which of course is death. Hope is what living is.

Hope can sound an empty common word,

but it seems so much more real than most things I hear of Love.