Only Hope (57/90)

I did nothing today. My dad was home this weekend so I made no plans, and apparently neither did my parents.

I think all I did today was hope. I hoped that maybe we'd do something as a family. I hoped we would actually eat a meal together, or watch a movie together, or go to the mall. Just do something as a family, because I made sure that I could be with my family. But we just sat around, everyone in a different room, everyone doing their own thing.

I hope a lot. I hope for a lot of things, many of which I know have very little chance of ever happening. In the past I've hoped that people would have seen that I wasn't as okay as I pretended, and ask about it. I've hoped that maybe things could improve instead of getting worse for my family. And I know that just hoping isn't enough to exact change.

But it's all I can do. If I admit it to myself, I hope for a lot of things late at night. My thoughts, daydreams, whatever you'd like to call them, the ones before bed, are just hopes. And these hopes are as implausible as the others. These hopes have to do with a boy. Granted, they are based on what he's said to me.

My hopes are just that he follows through with what he says. That was the hope for tonight, and right now I've given up hope that he will. And still somehow on his end he hopes to get what he wants in the end, without giving anything. Tonight is the last night I'm going to hope that something could come of this, because right now it seems like my hopes are futile.

Usually when my hopes are shattered, I just lower my expectations. But if you keep lowering your expectations once your hope is gone just so you can hold out for more hope, then eventually you really have nothing to hope for. You can get all the way to hoping that they'll be a decent human being, and if you have to hope for that, then you should've been done with that hope a long time ago.

Lowering expectations in order to have hope isn't the way that hope works. You should be able to hope in whatever situation you are in, no matter the circumstances. If you have to lower your expectations, then you're hoping for the wrong thing. And I know hope is a funny thing, but if hoping is taking too much stress on you, then you need to find something, or someone, else to hope for, I think.

I just hope I'm right in this. Because I'm sick of hoping for the wrong ones.