Make Believe: Poems for Hoping Again

by Victoria Hutchins

It will be you, deciding your life deserves hope. Making a life worth believing in.

did you know that in the three seconds before you kiss someone for the first time, you can feel your heartbeat in your eyelids? Or that someday, when you finally tell someone about the thing you’re sure makes you irredeemable, and you search their eyes for disgust—you’ll find only love? Welcome to the world. You’re going to get hurt here, and then you’ll beg for seconds: Can I have just a few more seconds?

Mortality is loud when you were infinite just a moment ago.

I didn’t have the words to say: Please come back. We don’t have much time together—I can hear the moments passing.

Somewhere in the universe, all the bad things are still just dreams.

Somewhere in the universe, it still hasn’t occurred to you to hide.

Somewhere in the universe, time is still worth begging for.

When did you forget how to let go?

What if you tell the truth, or worse: act on it? Someday when you’re older, you won’t be afraid of the secret. You can’t see it from where you are now, but all along, it was a blessing.

Maybe everything I have ever attributed to otherworldly forces is the work of human hands.

Listen to me—we are only here for a second. You will be young for every moment of your life, and then you will be gone. Don’t waste another second of the music wondering if it’s too late to dance.

Sure, I would love for my wanting to be less obvious. But I came into the world hungry, and I intend to leave licking the plate. I came into the world thirsty, and I’ll slurp until the glass is taken away.

I don’t want anyone to shrink so that I can feel tall. What I really hope is that somewhere in the universe, there’s a planet beholden to nothing at all. Where the creatures rise when they please, and the sky is every color at the same time, and gender is a silly human idea that has never crossed their creature minds.

Slowly, your soul will blink its eyes open after a hibernation you would have sworn was a death. And there it will be, just when you thought you were dead inside: one thing you can feel.

Stick around to look back someday and thank yourself for making it to the morning.

On your darkest nights, when next year feels unfathomable and you’re tempted to stop the music— Could you just sing me the tune of tomorrow?

Hope is what gets you out of places you don’t fit anymore. Hope is the only path toward the tomorrow that will be better. Hope is a shit-shoot. A shit-shot worth taking.

There’s an idea: to accept help—not because I can’t carry it alone, but simply because it’s heavy.

Watch how shame evaporates when you hold it up to the light.

How human of us to trace her silhouette in relation to our own.

I know we’re strangers now but if I ever hear you’re in Houston, I’ll buy real Cheerios, just in case. I know we’re strangers now but if you die before I do, I’ll keep you alive.

have so much to do, you always say. But the doing always gets done. It’s the living you should keep an eye on.

I may not live forever, but goddamnit, I am alive today.

How our veins look like roots and our neurons look like galaxies.