I Fell in Love with Hope - Lancali

tears, fathers’ tears, lovers’ tears. It became a place of last resort. A
place where people come to lose those they love. Their bodies were
given to the ground and their memories to grief.
It remembered every suffering stranger, but decades went by. Then a
century. There came so much pain that it forced itself to forget. It
tried not to feel at all. No pain, no warmth, no joy. Only morbid
curiosity forever searching for a reason to all that carnage.
It was that way till a child, unlike the rest, emerged.
He was an eternal being told by God, but he was also just a boy. A
lonely boy who reached for hope’s hand when it was lonely too and
as they found solace in each other, that soul, that creature, gave
itself a means of being with him.
No matter how many died, no matter how many lives it couldn’t save,
it had Sam. It created a body made of flesh and bone. It made itself
tangible, real, becoming a part of the world it’d spent so long
watching.
Sam was its first love. In one way or another, all first loves are lost.
Sometimes death is more merciful than life, and he chose its mercy
over mine, it said.
Although it didn’t just lose him. It lost everything attributed to him.
Everything they shared. So, it cried atop the pain of memories buried
in snow.
It fell in love with Sam because it thought they’d be together forever.
Forever is an illusion for mortal things, but time felt sorry for me, it
said. Time patched up my wounds, dried my tears, and did the best it
could simply by passing.
Time let it forget, but that soul kept Sam’s name. It kept its curious
body. It walked through its greater frame, the one made of wood and