That thing that everyone talks about

I’ve wanted to work with picture prompts for the longest time. But somehow, this time I didn’t feel like poetry.



All of us wait for something at some time or the other. But some of us are waiting all the time. When does that start happening? When does past tense turn into past continuous? What makes us wait, knowing all too well that we may never get what we wait for?

Waiting suggests hope. Hope suggests optimism. Optimism suggests a healthy spirit.
We wait, in the hope that someday, something good will happen. Someday, things will change and our fantasies will turn into realities, our desires fulfilled.

But, why wait? Why not try to drink it all up, as the flood comes in? Why wait for the flood that may never come? Why wait for that someday, that may never come? May be that is not so much optimism as it is stupidity. But we still wait. In the hope that we will get what we deserve and that we deserve well. And that once the wait is over, the result will be worth it. Of course, the wait may never be over and if it is, the result may not be worth it. We know it. We know that sometimes, it makes life seem like a typewriter without cartridge, on which you type and type, but nothing appears on its pages. Isn’t it then like exposing a cavity over and over, just to see if it still hurts? But that is hope. It is positive, but can be positively bad too.
And sometimes in hope, fantasy and reality merge together so uncannily, that you cannot see anything but an unknown haze far far away. It is a haze that stretches endlessly beyond a vast ocean of waiting, standing unrecognizable and unreachable. Sometimes, it is like that breathtaking sunset that we wish to touch and realize as our own, but know it will never be. We know that we will never have it and it may not be all that we hoped for even if we do, but we still hope that it will be. And we wait, just to see.

Great hope, miserable hope. It has a strange way of killing you, while keeping you alive.

I too, will wait for my pages to be filled in. Because I don’t want to rush through to the end, only to realize that they have been empty all along.

I will not live in hope, but I will let hope live in me.