On a bedside table, there is a photograph of a six-year-old girl holding a doll. They are quite similar. Both have bright golden curls, messy and free in the wind. Both have shining blue eyes, looking into the camera with such childish wonder and innocence. They are so small, so fragile, and yet vibrant with life and youth. Together, they have a whole lifetime ahead of them, a myriad of possibilities and options, such high expectations for the future, and yet they don’t need to care about anything of it just yet. The little girl clutches the doll tightly in her arms; she is bonded to it in a way only a child would really understand. The doll gives her courage and happiness like nothing else. If she were to let go of it, she would be letting go of a friend who kept all her secrets and dreams, a friend who had listened to her and given her strength.

Little over ten years later, the doll lies underneath her bed in a box. Its hair is now a matted greyish color, greasy and clumped together. Its glass eyes have clouded over slightly, becoming pale and dead. What used to be smooth, blushing cheeks are now dirty and blemished. Its limbs are twisted, with cracks along its small wrists, but on the back of its left arm, a child’s careful handwriting can still be seen, clumsily spelling the doll’s name: Hope.

However, the girl and her doll are still quite similar. She too lies underneath the ground. Her hair is also dirty and matted together, although one can still see that at some point in her life she dyed it a dark brown and used it to hide her face. Her eyes are pale and dead, but they had been this way for years before her death. Her cheeks are dirty and blemished from being in her box for so long. And she too has cracks along her small, thin wrists, red and jagged, all because she let go of her doll.