Hope

April 19, 1981

We live in a world of hope.

Not Camp Hope, not Mount Hope, not even Bob Hope or his wife, but a single foolish desperate hope without which life is not possible.

This keeps me rehashing the old adage: where there’s life there’s hope – when in reality the opposite is true: where there’s hope there is life.

This is the creed of billions of people clinging to something that we no longer have.

We hope for love, for money, for freedom, or sex mostly because we live without them, aching away our lives to get them back (if we ever had them in the first place.)

I remember confessing to Louise two years after our breakup that I had not made love to love to anyone since her, one of those shocking moments in my life I thought was such a secret, when everyone already knew.

I kept holding out hope I could win her back, and somehow thought I needed to remain loyal to her.

Hope is not always an illusion. Sometimes we become better people because we maintain something we want even if we never can get it, a faith in something beyond us that we can count on even if it never transpires, a faithfulness to a dream that we fight for to become real, and in that, becomes real in a different way.

I guess I’m a queer fish in all this.

I remember attending Cape Hope – a charity camp for ghetto kids I attended several summers when I was a kid, and the illusion of hope it held out for kids toughened by the city. Somehow, strolling through woods that I could not find in the busy streets of Paterson, I found magic.

Bob Hope used to make me laugh, helping me passed some of the most troubling moments of my life – my mother’s madness, the gang fights in the projects, even this sense that I wasn’t worth anything to anybody.

I still retain hope knowing all people are worth more than they know, even me.

My world is all hope, and if it is an illusion, then life itself is an illusion,.one I can't live without.