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“It’s hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat.” (Chapter 7 The Chorus Line: If I Was a Princess, A Popular Tune)
Water, crashing against the hull of our fate as we hurl further and further into the ocean’s waves. Eyes stare at us from the distance of the horizon and we pray to them to keep a sympathetic watch rather than an apathetic one if we do, as we all surely will eventually, go under.
Water, we float in a boat on the sea, unsure of whether we are being pulled down or lifted up, whether this is the start of a new voyage with new opportunities, or the end of the only dreadful journey we simultaneously want to leave while being too scared to run from.
Water, once it gave us life, drinking from the pool of life with the young joys of an innocent girl, rejuvenated by the same hands that would strange our throats and take that very air away from us just some years later. It was a temporary loan. We failed to realise that and the debt collector struck the door at dawn; we had nothing to give but our skin and our air, so the investment laid in futile, and we gave what we could.
Hope we kept even when the air left our bodies, but what substance does hope have? What food does hope give you when your stomach churns? Hope we kept, until that too was collected, drop after drop by the water we had acquired it from in the first place. It was a loan. We failed to realise that.
Here lay what is left of our hope, what was meant to let us breath through the water that wrapped around our throats:
There was a girl once. Her name doesn’t matter all too much, but she was a girl for sure. How do I know you ask? Why, her smile of course! It was the way she walked, the way she talked, the way she greeted everyone with a shimmer in her eyes that made her warmth present. The faint colour along her cheeks, and the wonderful approving speech, oh how she loved whatever her eyes looked on, and her looks went everywhere! Oh how I wish I had the hope she did.
This nameless girl, the girl of hopes and dreams, she frolicked around the paddocks and fields, until one day she met a man. Now they frolicked together instead, a pair of inseparable nature, the hope gleaming from one to the other, until one day, he got down on one knee and asked the question every girl wants to here: “Will you be mine?”
She said yes, but like us all, she didn’t realise. It was a loan. He gave her hope, she gave him herself. “Will you be mine?” Surely she thought “Oh, why yes of course!” rather than whats she should have thought: “Well of course I’ll be yours! Until death do us part, I will be your property, with modesty, I’ll do whatever you please, I’m properly yours”
So she was his, the same as all brides in any marriage, and when it all came to an end, he came to collect her hope as well