The Other Side of Hope

Hope is the only thing we ever seem to hold on to, desperately. And sometimes we don't know or understand what we're holding on to. Sometimes it really doesn't make sense, all we can see is painful routes and we don't know which one is less painful. We're stuck in our place with nothing but hope, and we have no idea where this hope will take us because we've already learned that hope is not all about the best endings. Sometimes hope ironically leads us to the worst experiences. Sometimes hope changes us to people we never thought we'd be.

Behind every decision we make, we hold out that spark of hope, most of the times unintentionally, sometimes we don't even realize it, but it stays there waiting to be ignited, usually by the wrong people and the wrong situations, to open doors we've been trying to keep closed, and to open wounds we've been trying so hard to heal.

It's not easy to be hopeless though, even at the darkest moments of our lives. The hope keeps growing, we feed it from our souls, and when the hope dies, it's agonizing, leaving only a distorted version of the picture we drew in our heads, and the remains that we'll try to bring to life again. But somehow the hope grows again and again, and the spark turns into a blazing fire.

It's an inevitable truth. Hope could be the only thing keeping us alive, connecting us to everything that matters, but hope is also what kills us.

We're bound to live with it because we can't live without it. We're bound to live with hope and heartache as two sides of the same fate. We're bound to watch the sun set in our world and wait for the day that it will rise again, for us.

And maybe the only way to stay alive when we're on fire is to keep burning.

The Cycle of Madness

Sometimes you stay under water to see how long you can hold your breath. Sometimes you wait till the very last possible moment because you think you can take it, you can make it to those few more seconds. That's what it's like with people too. Some relationships are exactly like that, except that when it's time to finally come up for air, there's none. There's only a tight space of nothingness. There's only another form of drowning.

It's really powerful, the way people can make you change, and how life is all about those human interactions that take you on rolling tides through all possible feelings. You see colours you've never seen before. You fall in love with new shades. But there are also shades that you learn to hate. There are memories you wish you could forget, and memories you hold so close to your heart even if someday it becomes hurtful to remember them. It just happens. A home that was once full of life becomes abandoned, and a face you knew so well becomes distant  and difficult to trace.

Usually the ones you love the most are the ones you hurt the most. You love them for who they are then you get mad at them for who they are. You break them, and you mend them, then break them all over again, and sometimes the pieces just don't fit again. Even the most beautiful love stories and friendships never really quite survive. They build each other and support each other but there are always points where they just wreck each other.

Sometimes a word slips out of your mouth and it's almost like you can hear the sound of their heart breaking. Sometimes it's hard to look into someone's eyes because not only you'll remember, but you'll feel the pain of what you did to each other. Sometimes home is a person, then things go wrong and suddenly you're left with the remains of a deserted place, frozen in time with no where to go. Sometimes you're stuck and your legs won't move and your heart won't just belong anywhere else, and sometimes you move on but you can't find a point where the past ends. Sometimes you love someone then you can't even be their friend. Sometimes you love someone then you won't even know how to be their friend. Sometimes the only way to avoid hurting someone is by hurting yourself. Sometimes hope is a dangerous thing.

It's scary to think that you could give up on love because of one person, that you could lose faith in friendship because of one person, that you could lose the ability to trust or the capacity to forgive because of one person, and that you could lose track of who you are because of one person.

But if people are so dangerous, how do you save yourself when you can't even exist without them?
How do you avoid ruining someone else?
And how do you forgive yourself for that?
How do you avoid loss when there are so many ways to lose someone?
How do you feel without becoming vulnerable and exposed?
How do you find balance between who you are and who you wish to be?

And if people have the power to make you blossom and the power to make you bleed, how do you give them one power without the other?
If being a friend or a lover or even family could be the beginning of a cycle of madness, how do you make it stop?

Dear Stranger,

Dear Stranger,
Would it take you by surprise if I told you a bit about me? Would you listen to my tales and try to find yours within them? Would you feel my spirit?
For I once had a spirit that was glowing all over my face. And I met strangers like you, some of which became my best friends, but some of my best friends have become strangers again.

Dear Stranger,
The world has broken me to pieces, and now I know I only get to find them as I choose to break again and again. I hope you find yours too. I know you must be drained by all your struggles, but I hope you know I'm willing to listen to your stories. I want you to look me in the eyes and see me for who I am, to reach out for my essence. I want you to try to get past all the layers and the rumbling storm that's making me shake on the inside. Can you feel that? Can you see me trying to keep from falling?
I want you to know that I'd rather close up on myself and find comfort in being alone, but I'm making an effort to open up to you.

Dear Stranger,
I've seen enough to make me give up on you, even before I know who you are. I have many reasons to avoid meeting your eyes as you approach me because sometimes I hope my relationship with you stays at the borders of 'Hello'. So would you see past that? Would you see past my broken smile?

Dear Stranger,
I'm sure there are things you'll understand about me, for you've also had your share of heartache. But would you be willing to face that with me? Would you get past all the superficial talks and discuss the things that truly matter to me? Would you acknowledge my feelings even if you didn't completely understand them? Would you be interested to know what makes me comfortable and what scares the hell out of me? Would you want to know the memories that stir my heart and the thoughts I can't get out of my head? Would you be gentle with my insecurities, would you be patient?

Dear Stranger,
I've had a hard time holding on to my beliefs. I've worked so hard on keeping the good things good, if that makes any sense to you. I've managed to find dreams and aspirations on the days I even lost interest in living. I still believed in love when I had every reason not to, and somehow I could still trust. But it's not as simple as it looks. Doubt is my companion with every step. And with time I've learned that it's okay to doubt to reach the solid grounds of truth.

Dear Stranger,
After so many chances lost, it's extremely difficult to give another. It gets harder to forgive too, and you become a prisoner to the memories and the pain. You become vulnerable to even the simplest human interactions. You realize that with every letting go, you've also lost some energy and gained some fear. And now fear is always side by side with hope. Sometimes I feel they've become the same thing.

Dear Stranger,
If we ever meet, I hope you'll be honest enough to trigger some courage inside of me, so that I can look you in the eyes and let your storm collide with mine, and hope that everything we have in common will bring us some peace and quiet.

Dear Stranger,
Perhaps we will fall in love with the same shades and have our tears falling to the same melodies.

Dear Stranger,
I hope that no matter what, you will always follow your heart.
Perhaps your heart will guide you to me.

Nowhere to go...

It is said that hurricanes are the world's second most dangerous natural disaster after earthquakes. However, I believe they should come first. The hurricane starts and it blows away everything, the chance of anything surviving it is almost zero. It kills everything on its way. It has no mercy. It takes no rest. It is as ugly as it is.

When it comes to one self, there is no competition. You don't experience an earthquake. Yet if you do experience a hurricane, you know it's a number one killer. It drains the life out of you while you're still breathing. And there's nothing in the world as devastating as the calm that comes after the storm.

It's in the calm that I learned that the hurricane started when I first tried to run away from everything I feared I'd become, when I took every possible road to avoid being what I hated in everyone else.
When you suffer because of people, when you've had too many awful experiences, there comes a point when you're trying so hard to resist everything that has to do with the person and what they made you feel.
You resist anger, but you find youeself angry all the time. You resist pain, but you've been hurt so long that it can no longer leave. You resist grief, but you find it with every step you take towards happiness. You resist selfishness, but how can you protect yourself in this terrible fight? And you resist fear. You resist it till you become it. You become your worst fear. You become your worst enemy.
Whether someone says it to your face, or you find it out on your own, you just realize you've become everything you've run from, and suffered from.
And after the hurricane is over, after all the tears and the heartache, you lose something as valuable as connection, not just with the world, but with yourself too.

The world has a way of being so ruthless sometimes. It allows you to know the taste of joy, of laughing your heart out, of dancing to its rhythm and feeling the beauty in it, but then it strikes you with endless shots at the heart. Something is always missing. Something is always wrong. You become a prisoner of yourself and everything you wish you could change.

When the hurricane is over, the picture is clearer. It's then that you can see that a comfort zone is only a myth, and that home can not last.
But what if home was the only thing you had? Where do you go when the storm is over? Where do you go when you want to scream your heart out and run as far as you can from your very own self?

Where do you go when there's nowhere to go...?

Pieces of the Heart

“Where do the pieces go?”, she asked all of a sudden.
“What pieces?”
“Pieces of the heart. Where do they go? How much of ourselves do we lose with every missing piece? Tell me for God’s sake!”, she yelled with tears streaming down her face, “I just want them back”, she then whispered, “I just want to feel whole again…”
And I think a few pieces of my heart disappeared somewhere.

Sometimes we find comfort in silence, in the calm after the storm. Sometimes when we are so tired of chasing the answer, we actually realize we never asked the right question. My God, we may even forget the question, or worse, forget to ask it in the first place. And that is why there are battles we never win, because we do not know how to fight them, and there are answers we are never satisfied with, because we do not really know what we are looking for…

I used to think the pieces only go missing when our hearts get broken, and to believe the idea of the whole thing as a terrible loss. But then I somehow realized we lose those parts of ourselves in the very beginning, before any heartbreak, and we do not actually lose them, we exchange them.
What if it goes like that, that with every encounter with someone, we exchange pieces of our hearts with theirs? What if we never lose them, that we just lend them to someone who needed that one piece that changes everything? And what we take back might not necessarily be equal to what we gave, but it is just what we needed as well. What if the whole process is about gaining, about accepting pieces that are not ours yet it is us they belong to?

I think our hearts were made to be broken and the pieces are meant to wander around between us leaving a different impact within each of us. I think we have to let go of some pieces in order to feel whole again, not incomplete, in order to leave some space for something we could not clearly see, in order to remind ourselves that we do not need to gather up the pieces after a heartbreak, we do not need to search outside ourselves for what we think went missing, but rather look inside.
Look closely. Look at the spaces in your heart. Look at that tiny space that used to hold a piece of your own. Does it seem empty to you? Does it mean you lost a part of yourself you can never get back, or does it actually bring you closer to the things you could never find before your heart was broken?

I always wondered why people always defined heartbreak. Like heartbreak is the end of a relationship. Heartbreak is an unreturned love. Heartbreak comes with lying, with cheating, with grief, and with death. But we forget that heartbreak also comes with life, with perfect love, and with joy.
Heartbreak has no definition and no limit.
Our hearts may break with a love so great we never thought would find us, with a song that explains all what we couldn’t find words to say, with our finger between a baby’s tiny hand, with a simple gift at the very right time. See, heartbreak also comes with hope, with gratitude, with the presence of someone, not only their absence. Heartbreak comes with sunrise and with sunset.

In all its forms, our hearts burst open to let some light in, to experience more of life’s wonders, to enjoy and appreciate its beauty, to learn, to love, and to live.

So after a long silence I manage to say, “The pieces do not go anywhere. They are always there, taking different forms, touching some lives. They represent your encounters with everyone and everything around you, and even if some days it feels some are missing, they will always come back, bringing about a new vision, a new tale…”
And I realized those few pieces of mine did not disappear, she has them now. I guess she realized it too because she smiled, so I also smiled and said, “We never lose the pieces of our hearts…”  

It's Scary Growing Up

It feels cold tonight. It's unusually quiet as she hurries with blurry eyes desperately trying to
get away from those eyes glaring at her, seeing through her, filling up her cracks with so much cold. She just wants to go home.

But then she trips and falls, silently screaming as those icy hands manage to grab her feet and drag her back into the void.

It did it again.

The past is hunting her down.

The past never gets tired of playing those chasing games till it gets her.

And it gets her every time...

It's scary growing up.
It's like getting lost on your own path, tripping over your own feet, unaware that a part of you changes as you get up after every fall.
One day you just look around, look inside and realize nothing is the same anymore. Somehow you're able to see the difference, hiding under all the pretending and the lies you chose to believe so that you don't have to be here at this point. The point where reality hits you that what you take for granted is what eventually kills you. Because what you take for granted is the very same thing that ends up changing, and the worst part is that it doesn't stop there. It ends up changing you too.

Back to that void, she is trapped in the very tiny distances between the memories she never got over, the emotions she never faced, the lessons she never learned, and the truths she never believed. All the time, she chose to convince herself she did the opposite of all that only to find herself reaching a dead end, because not a single step forward can be taken now without so many steps back, back into everything she left unresolved.

And with all the help you could get, still you find so many things you have to face by yourself because how can you talk about them to someone when you can't talk about them to yourself? How do you say them out loud and expect them to have any meaning when they already make no sense in your head? How do you explain-even to someone who might already know it-how you changed so much to the extent that you're not sure who you are anymore, that you can't yet face the fact that you're so different from the person you've always believed yourself to be?

What's the thing with growing up?
It seems more like reapeating your mistakes till you get so fed up with yourself, rather than learning from them after a time or two.
It seems more like living up to the expectations you list for yourself so people would love you, rather than truly believing in the beauty of who you are and living up to it regardless of people's judgements.
It seems more like living in the shadow of your mistakes and others', rather than forgiving them, and yourself, and letting it go.
It seems more like settling for a life that stops you in your tracks and takes you down with every bump along the way, rather than a life lived to the fullest, enjoying the good more than, or even as much as getting affected with the bad.

So seriously what's the thing with growing up?! Because it actually seems more like growing apart, apart from the things we love most, from the people who mean the most to us, and sometimes apart from ourselves.
What's the thing with today's world?! This isn't how it's supposed to be. It shouldn't be so hard to find someone to trust or to trust ourselves. It shouldn't hurt to put our faith in people because all they do is let us down. It shouldn't consume all of our strength not to let ourselves stop caring that it eventually hurts like hell to care.
And what's the thing with people breaking bonds till the very last thread that ties them to others?! It shouldn't be so hard not to betray, or fail, or lie to someone you love. It shouldn't be so hard to keep your promises, to mean what you say and to take responsibility for your actions. And it shouldn't be so easy to break someone's heart.

Where did she go wrong?
She's seen the worst of people who got the best of her and yet it was never enough.
She's been through things that hurt her to the point that she's starting to question everything she was once certain about, including herself. And no words can describe the amount of pain you have to deal with when you can't accept to let this change what's left unchanged in you, when you have to fight to be able to love, to trust, to believe, to hope, to try, to dream, and to care without being so scared of the consequences.

It's scary growing up with all those hearts turning cold.
It's scary growing up when you look at an old picture of yourself and you almost can't recognize yourself, when you look at an old picture with your family and you miss how enjoyable it was to spend time with them, when you look at an old picture with your friends and your heart aches at how distant you've become.
It's scary when you know some chapters in your story have ended so soon, and others, God knows when they will just reach an ending.

And all the bridges that you burned, the fire still lingers in your veins.
And all the memories that haunt you, they got you running wild in circles.
And in the middle of such chaos a question remains unchanged: Are you strong, as vulnerable as you are?

The Disappointment Effect

Again, I end up alone behind the doors I close on myself. Sometimes I seriously can't figure out one reason why I choose this even when I don't want to.

I'm always relieved though, to have this bit of sanity that stops me from believing that I let fear control me every time, then only in those moments that I'm completely out of my mind, I come to face the fact that I've tried everything from making peace with fear to running away from it, and even being completely fearless at times but nothing seemed to be satisfying enough.

But now I know why I reached this point, why I'm stuck in it no matter how many times I try to leave, and why it hurts so much to even try to leave. It's because I've had a share of disappointments more than I could possibly take. And what hurts most about this is when you keep believing in those who disappoint you, when you refuse to give up on them, when you keep holding on to the hope that they will realize the damage they've done and they'll try to fix it, but you just end up disappointed again and again, and again.

What if you've tried everything whether to blame them for it or just let them see it for themselves and none of it mattered? What if you care about them so much and you can't walk away?

And in some insane moments, when you've really exhausted every option, you will sit back and laugh about it with tears streaming down your face because you're usually the one who gets ridiculously hurt only because you care so much.

Sometimes it ate me away, that fear of getting disappointed all over again, because there's only so much I can take right?! And then I would unintentionally hurt the ones I love the most, or even the only ones who are truly there for me, just because the pain is so overwhelming. I find myself still forced to run and hide behind the walls I try to build, and after all that as soon as I catch a glimpse of hope I chase it like a fool and, you know, nothing. You kind of get used to it too, and even that doesn't make it any better. There are times when you even get disappointed in yourself. 

There came the hardest truth, that the best of me could simply be the worst, for I couldn't have imagined it would get me nowhere in this world unless it's accompanied by pain, loss, and frustration. I had no idea that constantly trying to fix things was going to break me to pieces, and also hit me again just as I put the pieces back together.

You see, sometimes you give all that you've got, and somehow you're the one who gets left behind, desperately searching for a way out in some comforting truth, or even learning how to live without peace of mind. 

And as sad as it sounds, what makes you special is what gets you hurt.

Sometimes a curse lies within the gift.

Once Upon a Life

And what is life but moments of feeling?

I woke up one day feeling as if the world has crushed me in my sleep. But I didn’t blame the world for it, I blamed myself. That’s what I’ve always done. I would always listen to its crappy voice telling me that I’m the evil in my own world, and somehow it could also convince me to take the blame on myself for every stupid thing, and end up miserably unable to live in my own skin. I almost hated myself as much as I loved myself.
But then it all changed.

Do you know that moment when you hear your voice on a recording and you almost can’t recognize it? That’s not the voice you’ve always heard!
Sometimes it’s funny though, you may just end up laughing about it, even though somewhere deep inside, you figured out that people have always heard you differently, not like you have always heard yourself, worse.

I would look at a picture of mine and still find it kind of weird that this is the same person as me! I mean come on! Is this really the way I look in people’s eyes? But why do I see myself differently? Better maybe?
Then I would look into my eyes and it would shock me every time how they always carried that tinge of sadness even in the happiest pictures, and still I would wonder if that too, was what people saw.
Sometimes the thought itself made me feel open and exposed, as if someone has removed all the layers of untold stories and unresolved feelings, and reached the core of who I am, and that made all the difference.
Because it was only then that I realized it has never been about the core alone to tell me who I really am. It was about the layers, the untold stories and the unresolved feelings.

Everything that I had to go through was because of everything that I had to feel, And if it hadn’t been for all the feelings I’ve experienced, I would’ve never learned nor understood what life was all about.
My core is there for me to feel, the stories are there to be told, even to myself, and the feelings are there to be connected.

I’ve seen life through the best and the worst of visions, but I’ve never been at peace with it except when I truly felt it.
With all its joy, with all its agony, with all its beauty, with all its ugliness, with all its warmth, with all its cold, with all its honesty, with all its deception, with all its truth, with all its lies, with all its peace, with all its wars, with all its calmness, and with all its wildness, life has broken my heart in every way, yet life has healed it as well.
And with all the heartache I’ve learned that this is what it takes to be human, it takes a lot.
And it’s not easy at all.

So today I choose to tell my stories.
I choose to wear proudly my layers of faith, love, courage, intuition, inspiration, hope, passion, persistence, and strength. And also all the layers of pain, fear, and doubt that it took to be able to hold on to each of them.
I choose to laugh at the world, to take new pictures with a gleam of happiness in my eyes.
I choose to keep my heart open and exposed.
I choose to be me.

Shades of Doubt

I’ll always remember this feeling.

The truth is, I never saw this coming, but somehow I did.
And it’s strange how your mind tricks you. It allows you to understand everything, to know everything you need to know, but one morning you wake up, and you find the sky smeared with shades of doubt, your shades. Suddenly you can’t breathe, there’s no air, there’s only this suffocating nothingness in the atmosphere. You realize that what you’ve always known is almost something you can’t recognize. It may not even be true.

I’ll remember fighting this over and over. I’ll remember how I did my best to ignore the voices in my head, and my stupid heart trying to find a way out of all the layers of love I’ve filled it with for so long. And this is the thing, love. Because who knows what love is? What makes you say that you love someone? How do you know if it’s right? What if at some terrifying moment, you became uncertain of anything? What if you knew nothing at all? What if it felt as if you don’t know what kind of life you’re leading anymore, as if you’ve been living someone else’s life?

When you make a promise to someone, how do you know you will never break it? What if you break it? How do you live with the guilt? And after you broke it, what if you were wrong? What if there was no chance to fix it?

You know what they say, that it takes courage to keep a promise.
Guess what? It takes courage to break one too.
But no matter what, even if you’re doing the right thing, you’ll always be the one who broke a promise.
At least, this is how you’ll always see yourself.

You’ll always remember everything before you broke your promise.
You’ll remember how you were taken care of, how you were loved and cherished, how you were changed into a much better person, how you were handled with care and how you were always supported. You’ll remember how you were always the best thing ever happened to them, how you were their only remedy. You’ll remember how you were fixed, but you’ll also remember that it was you who broke them, and that by hurting them, you’ve hurt yourself more.

So if you wake up to a morning like this, and your vision was blurred by the heaviness of your tears, if you saw everything smeared with the gloominess of your pain, don’t look at the sky.
Don’t look up there because you’ll see the shades of doubt that broke your heart.
Don’t look up there because it will remind you of all what you held on to, and then along the way, they just got lost.
Don’t look, because there you’ll find, that what you loved most is now something you don’t know.

Do yourself a favor, and don’t look up there, don’t look back.
Someday it will all make sense, but for now, just look ahead and please, forgive.

And maybe someday we’ll come back to each other.
Maybe we will find that the ugly face of the truth was only a mask waiting to fall.
Maybe it will reveal the most beautiful face we’ll ever know.
Maybe one morning we will wake up and we will find the sky coloured again with shades of love, forgotten love…

Far From Home

When you lose yourself, best-case scenario is you find yourself again. Worst-case scenario?

It usually starts by taking your eyes off your way, to look back maybe. Or even worse, you are moving forward but you are moving towards something that's not really there. It's like you're driven by something that's eating you up with every step, and at some point you realize you can't go on because there's not enough of you left.

Sometimes it feels like everything is against you, like it's what they call the perfect storm. And no matter how hard you try to hold it together, no matter how strong you fight to be, sometimes strong is not enough.

You stop being who you are. You may not even recognize who you are. You learn to live with an unbearable silence because you can’t explain what you are going through. You doubt everything you ever believed was there in you, and you doubt every word people might say to convince you that you are still you. For some reason, their words seem so unbelievable, like they are talking about someone else, someone you used to know, someone you even wish you could be.

One of the most painful experiences is living your life as a stranger, and not wanting to live it because it hurts so much...

When you try to find some reason for what you are going through, you end up feeling devastated. You end up feeling empty because you are not sure of anything anymore. All your wishes, all your memories, all your feelings, all your fears, all your thoughts, all your worries,  all your questions and all your answers, they all play like a sad movie, a sad song that brings tears to your eyes. And you just don't understand what could have possibly happened to make you suffer like that. 

But you know what hurts the most?

It is knowing that deep inside you, you've locked a part of you that promised not to ever leave, and to always remind you of all that you were and all that you are meant to be. It may be a person, a feeling, a memory, a bond, it may be the only thing that keeps you sane all the way long. And with all that, when you need it most, you can't reach it, even though it's trying so hard to make you see that it never left, that it believed in you and will always do. You just can't believe it. You can't understand...

Everything that used to bring you comfort now reminds you of everything you are missing, reminds you of home...

This is the worst-case scenario.
Worst-case scenario is when you can only hope that you will find your way back, when the best you can do is to trust your feet to find the path to bring you back where you belong, when you have to use the very little power left in you to smile against the ugly face of this unknown world and say it like you mean it, "I choose the best-case scenario. I will find myself again..."