Hope. Hope really was a wonderful thing; it could keep even the most browbeaten spirit up and running for hours, just to get to that warm golden glow at the end of the tunnel. Hope is a delicate balance of trust, persuasion of one’s self and pure, untainted faith. It really is a beautiful thing to see one hope for something; it was of the utmost purity how one flicker of light could do so much for one’s hope of a warm golden glow, how much faster it could make one run. Sometimes, you realize it wasn’t there at all; sometimes you don’t see a flicker but simply hope, hope will spur you on eagerly. But there was also a negative side to hope.

Hope could be lost, dropped at the turn of a hand, cast away like a useless piece of trash that had promised to deliver, and after much pretence, didn’t. Hope could drop into the darkness and fade away like a light burnt out. Hope could fall, rise then fall, never to get back up again. Most of all, hope could be given up on, trod on and discarded, not necessarily needed again, but deemed worthless. It becomes, in clinical terms, a lower priority. When one sees the faint dim glow at the end of the tunnel go out, we run faster, but only for a while, only for so long can we hope on nothing but faith when one had been taught to believe what you see and not what you believe. So we run, on and on, faster, against the headwind and pushing on, backs grinding into the darkness, but only for so long can we rely on blind faith.

Soon, it too, fades into the pitch.

At first we run, run on fear and panic, but soon we do the only thing left we know how, after running, that is. We stop and lie down, curling into a pathetic ball and waiting for an inevitable death or a new glow to hope for, whichever comes first. Be it the cold or some dark presence we simply begin to hope in a new way.

We hope for death. Quick, painless ends, that will surely, hopefully, last a longer tunnel and give us back some sort of sadistic freedom. We beg, beg for it to take us from the darkness and replace it with light. But with death comes nothing, only darkness and an eternity of waiting. So, in short, giving up hope is waiting to die. Choose what you what, but I’d rather run myself to death, hoping for that little bit longer, hell, maybe it will pay off, giving me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

In short, hope gives us more chance of life, therefore we hope...

For light, for air, for a second chance. Hope is never wasted.