What is cause without effect? When we give ourselves entirely to hope it creates room for trust. Trust is how we build our knowledge of the world, it gives us the opportunity to expand, within ourselves and within others. This allows us to believe the best intentions of people. We assume they would never act with malice, it is very rosy world. The birthplace of forgiveness.
Forgiveness makes us feel better about being hopeful. We feel elevated, evolved even. The more we forgive with more we hope we are being good and better, that evolved thing again. Do we forget though? Often forgiveness and forgetting never go together, they are not bundled. The forgiving may come with time, healing may even follow but we hold back the forgetting. It is our ace in the hole, a get out of jail free card.
When I was seven years old, I begged my parents for a birthday party, all the other kids on the block had one. My parents agreed, I couldn’t wait. My best friend at the time promised to be there and we were going to take pictures together. So there I was on a hot sticky June afternoon, the sounds of high speed fans punctuating the air. I was in my blue and silver party dress with a big white bow on the back, the day had finally arrived and everything was perfect. But my best friend wasn’t there. The aroma of Jollof rice caked the air, beautifully set in the price position, the middle of a well decorated room, waiting to be photographed and consumed. Streamers, balloons and birthday cards dotted the well lit room. The traditional photo op was prepped, cake, coca-cola and fanta and the all important Jollof rice. My eyes darted to the door at every noise, searching for my best friend, photo time came and he still wasn’t there. We cut the cake and he wasn’t there, the party ended and he was not there. It broke my heart, and worse I was sad my entire party. His mother sent a barbie doll as a gift a few days later, I set it alight, accidentally.
The photos from that day has long since been lost to the many moves my family made, and I am glad. When I spoke to him after the party, he said he had forgotten, as an adult that hurts even more to think about. That friendship is long over, but every now and again, when his name pops up on some social media platform, I wonder, I hope. He was a shitty friend, but a part of me still hopes he wasn’t. Till this day I cannot look at Jollof rice, cake and coca-cola in the same room without a tinge of disappointment. And that is truly sad, because Jollof and cake are magic.
We imagine things are more than they are in our heads. We do that because we want and hope for the best in people, in ourselves. Often we are hoping our instincts are wrong and follow our hearts, we learn the latter isn’t always best thanks to experience. Our hearts are creatures of hope and we refuse to trust the facts when there is overwhelming hope. Facts don’t lie, people do. Facts have a track record. If you are the mistress, what will make him faithful to you? Facts have track records.
We get caught up in the ‘Maybe this times’. Maybe tomorrow or next week. We lose many hours, many tears in the Maybe moments. When we live purely in hope and the maybes we become tied in hurt, there are some good moments but the hurt is clear. It creates opportunities for people to take advantage of you.
In my attempt to give up hope and live on facts, I was more discerning on how I gave my trust. The longer I was reluctant to trust the harder it was to trust. This created a new set of problems for me, a world where no one was trustworthy. A place where trust was earned in a very binary way and hope was for kids parties. Some of this trust aversion has found its way into my current lifestyle. Though a more hopeful one, it is also cautious. What is the balance between too much trust fueled by hope and earned trust based on facts with no hope?
If I cannot give my heart fully and wholly is it worth having it? If it is always breaking then why give it away at all? How do you leap when your eyes refuse to close?