I Fell in Love with Hope

by Lancali

What if death is the explosion of countless synapses, a light going out, and that’s it?

Human beings are selfish. They don’t accept this because they cannot fathom a world without their existence. As such, there must be an eternal life of some kind. Whether it is found in spirituality, in delusion, or in God, there must be an after. A Heaven.

If there’s something everyone can agree on, it is that there is no pain in death. Only an eternal sort of peace.

I want to share a final kiss and tell him that it’s okay to let go. That I will be with him till he fades from his body and his soul passes to another world we cannot share. But I don’t. For all the human I am not, I am selfish, and I don’t want to live without him. So I pretend to be asleep and hold Sam tighter to me till he falls too.

The only reason Sam fought this hard to survive is that he wanted to live for me. For all the memories we share, they are also full of his suffering. From the way Sam stands, and guilt runs across his face, it’s clear that I am no longer enough to overshadow it…

“You were my hope, my sweet Sam,” he says. His warmth, which once bled into me with nothing but our connection, is cooling. Instead, the light is drained. He kisses my hairline. “I just can’t wait for any more sunrises.”

Sometimes hope just isn’t enough. It isn’t meant to save people.

I always wondered if the suns in his eyes would suit the moons in mine till they shut forever and every night left to come, it rained.

“There is no reason for tragedy,” I say. “One day, the universe will collapse, death will have no one left to claim, disease will have no one to infect, and time will come to an end, but even then, it will not have been for nothing. Because if we chose to only love what we couldn’t lose, then we would never love at all.”