Excerpt: Untitled Hope Novel

It’s the hoping that makes it the worst. Hoping that maybe you were wrong, that you misinterpreted, that maybe he will or has changed his mind. That maybe he’ll see what he’s walked away from so cavalierly, as if all the times your body was stretched along his, skin to skin, limbs wrapped around each other, never mattered a damn.

If not for hope, you’d be sad and grief-stricken and broken, but you’d know to stop
listening for the phone. You’d not to stop running to check e-mail. You’d know not to want to continue in a friendship with someone that you don’t want as a friend nearly as much as you want them as a lover, though you’ll take them as a friend because, when you’ve lost a love, you need all the friends you can get, right?

That’s what hope does for you. It makes you dream for the impossible. It makes you wait for a promise full of hot air and good intentions. Until suddenly, you wake up one morning and find yourself telling your best friend that you’re wasting the best years of your life being a stalker, when you could be off being stalked.

Hope is sick. Worse, hope makes you sick. I blame Ancient Greece.