Some Things I Hope To Be True In The End

I hope I learned to live well without the apologies I craved but never received. And that things weren’t as personal as they may have felt, even when those seemingly personal things stung.

I hope the broken men who broke me found peace and the strangers I met in passing were as interesting to the people they go home to as they were to me. I hope I came to understand that just because beautiful moments always came to an end doesn’t mean they didn’t matter (and maybe that’s what made them matter more).

I hope the younger generations keep opening their hearts and minds. I hope they continue to create a more loving world, even though I will no longer be here to see it. I’m crossing my fingers kids are allowed to stay young longer and never stop playing even when they grow older.

I hope my friends became all they wanted to be. The long-term pals and bygone ones, too. I hope each type of friend knew how much I loved and appreciated them.

I hope I found love and belonging, even when I thought I wouldn’t. Especially then. I hope life continued to surprise me and humble me and show me I knew a whole of a lot less than I thought I did.

I hope I continued to redefine what the word “family” meant and that sometimes family is not who we’re given but who we repeatedly choose. That said, even though my immediate family was dysfunctional and jagged and often painful, I would choose them in any other lifetime again and again and again if I had the chance. I hope I began to accept us for what we were, not what we weren’t.

I hope I didn’t get everything I wanted but I did get what I needed and found that was more than enough. I hope that while things may have ended up looking far different than I imagined, they were also so much better than I could have dreamt, too.

I hope I figured out that forgiveness is at the heart of healing and that hurt people hurt people but healed people can heal people, too. I hope I became the latter and I am crossing my fingers that it turns out karma isn’t as cruel as I initially believed. That people get the chance for redemption from their mistakes. But maybe redemption was never necessary in the first place.

I hope the way I led my life wasn’t necessarily something that others would remember but I decided to go on daringly, hopefully, painfully, and completely anyway, even though I would be forgotten in the end.

I guess I’ll just have to live and see.