Hope is like watching heavy clouds of rain form overhead, and praying they don’t rain down on you, soak your clothes through, and send shivers through your body. And if it does rain and storm, then hope is crossing your fingers that the sun will greet your eyes once more. Nothing is for certain, and that is hope. Hope is praying the glass doesn’t shatter—the thin casing around your heart that you entrust to someone eventually. You know, the guard we put around ourselves at some point or the next, hoping it’s strong enough to save us. But, of course, as every man-made thing goes, it is only temporary, and there are consequences to making it. You promise yourself you will never let that glass wall go down, and sometimes you even swear you aren’t the one that placed it there—small lies we tell ourselves to make us feel the safety that has never been guaranteed us. As our hearts beat, there is always that glass encasement keeping it from breathing fully. There is that suffocation we associate with comfort and protection, even though some part of us knows that once that glass breaks and shatters, the shards cut into our chests and make us bleed. This is the curse of man—hurting ourselves and calling it security, and then building up that glass box again only for it to be shattered once more and repeated over and over until everything is numb and we are made of that broken glass. And in the end, it destroys us. It takes away everything we are until hope is the biggest lie man ever knew.