I hope every night my name is re-carved into the walls of your chest, I hope my name burns like fire and peels your flesh. I hope it is what you scream when you wake up from your nightmares. I hope that even on your best days my name lingers, always ready to slip off your tongue and I hope it taste like vomit and guilt. I hope the absence of me floods you like a river during a storm and holds you captive like  an anchor lost at the bottom of the ocean. I hope you feel small like you did before I lowered the branches for you to climb to the promises you knew you couldn't reach when you made them. I hope you're hungry for the sound of my voice and starving to hear my laughter, I hope that every other girl you  make laugh will sound like a machine while you will always remember mine like crickets in the night. I hope you feed on the memories of me you turned to stone and I hope they break your teeth and give you chills because the grit and dirt taste nothing like me. I hope because hoping is the only thing that I can do. Hope is something that hollows you out until you become a shell with black eyes because you don't want to see the world after so much has changed. Hope is being the sun trying to get through the clouds, and it’s crying into your saturday morning coffee willing yourself to move on. It’s sitting in the passenger seat going down a windy road feeling the cold air go into your lungs and breathing out the person you were before. It's stepping outside in winter only in your pajamas and hearing snow crunch under your feet, and it's laying in the grass under a tree while the sun shines in patches over your body. Hope is there when the sky is blue but the world smells like rain, and when it’s two in the morning and it feels like the world has left you in space. Hope is there for you when you take your first steps and every first after that. There is no definition of hope, but you make your own and that alone gives you hope.