What Hope Looks Like

I can see now where the clouds break into blue on the horizon, and the keyhole, the light, the sun, the sky, peeks through like eager children.

It's where the sidewalk meets the road. Where a means of transportation becomes a life, an opportunity, and one's own demise.

Where 3 time zones come together in a highway-side weigh station outside San Francisco. We drive by that very weigh station and you ask me what hope looks like.

I say it's the urban decay scrawled in fading neon spray paint on dimly-lit nighttime subway stations, and it's the night train, and the single lit window in an apartment building on the old side of town.

It's a vision of yourself, standing on the treeless, snow top of the mountain, and you look back east towards hundreds of miles of earth, mountains, and home.

It's the brightness the earth emits towards the blue, the black, the beginning and the end.

It's doing 98(miles per hour) for 2 days straight, stopping on a sandy road, looking at the 4 adjacent sign less paths, identical and free of people, taking the first one you see and waking up in Mississippi.

It's when you head west and the trees get taller, and when the yellow street lines are gaining on your heels.

It is I, Myself, a pronoun who's definition is not easily found in online dictionaries.

It is your single maple tree among numerous oaks.

It's the corroded bronze keys of empty middle-of-nowhere gas stations at 2 a.m.

It's watching the last car in sight drive away until the rear lights fade to blurred Christmas tree ornaments against the black.

It's the passing from night to day, dawn to dusk, and the never ending dependable cycle of it.

The moldy vintage couch and concrete blocks that sit homeless by the roadside.

It's the empty fluorescent lights of late night city parking garages, and the hopeless streetlight-free country roads who lead to Great Barrington, and you know it's pitch, and black, and pure, like the dark sweating skin of Jamaica.

It's the words you can't see as you sit in the dark hoping you'll be able to read them tomorrow, for they cry only in the messy handwriting they inhabit.

It's staying up for 3 days straight because you didn't want to miss a split second of life smeared across the car window.

It is living in ink, pen, and paper and knowing the continuance is inevitable.

It is your moving pupils as they adjust to the light, and your happily tear-filled eyes who sing soul serenades to me, for any and all to hear, leaving me speechless for centuries disguised as seconds, as you wave a mournful goodbye.