i take a deep breath as i get into the shower.
without thinking about it, i close my eyes. i can feel my chest and my lungs and everything around me. i am so aware and present.
. . .
but being so present makes me realize how miserable i feel.
once again i’m begging for mercy, for understanding, for an answer.
one more day our inner monologue is distilled to cries and simple thoughts because it hurts too much to exist.
and somewhere between having started the deep breath and the current moment, where i stand with my thoughts, cold and miserable. a spurious thought crosses, unobstructed.
“just have hope."
.. 
just.. have hope to be enough. to not be forgotten. hope that someone will care about you not out of pity or misery. hope that things will work out.
hope that you won’t drown, hope that we won’t have more medical issues. have hope of finding a new job that with any luck can help feel any less suicidal. have hope that you won’t push everyone away and isolate and be stuck.
just. have. hope.
rot your every thought and throw them down the drain, in the hopes that things will just “work out”. even when they haven’t yet, even when the air feels like lead and every sunrise feels like the sun observes and mocks every movement we do, and every twilight feels like a dead end in the middle of nowhere.
crush and push everything aside in the hopes that it’ll be worth it. that something will turn out that isn’t just misery and fucking desolation.
just keep pushing and crying and sleeping and missing out on your own life, because surely, having hope will help.
and when nothing works out, and we’re left alone once again sleeping the days away,
when nothing feels right and the only escape feels like death,
when noone is around but the echoes of “what could’ve been”,
when everything is reduced to blurry memories and faint sensations,
just,
hope. you’ll be able to stay alive.
because there’s nothing to save us in this barren land,
no magic, no good endings or feel-good stories of how it all resolves.
so just keep hoping.
because that’s the only thing that will remain when everything else is gone.
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