echo Hope is a girl you meet at the playground near your house. She has her long hair tied in pigtails, and a smile that glows like the sun at dawn. You spend all your time at the playground with her. She pushes you back and forth on the swings, and although her arms aren’t strong enough to push you high, it feels as if you have the whole world in your hands as she pushes you. Reaching your hand upwards, as the clouds seem to trace the end of your fingertips, with the thrill of the wind breezing past you, it feels that if you reached out just a little further, you could even touch the blue of the sky. You remember telling her about how you felt on the swings. She giggles. You are not the first to say that, she tells you. She has had many friends before, some that climbed trees now long since chopped down, some that walked fields now littered with towering skyscrapers, some that looked out the windows of a horse drawn carriage, all to look at the sky. To watch the birds soar across it, the rays of light through fluffy white clouds. She laughs, and it sounds like a tinkling of bells. You marvel at all the friends she’s had, short and tall, shy and brave, from different sides of the world, that once looked up at the sky. You ask her, if these friends were now adults, if they ever brought her out of this playground, to touch the sky above. Two, she whispers back, who built a large, large balloon, and attached it to a basket. Two brothers, who stayed friends with her till the day they died.
She’s always at the playground when you’re there. You ask her if she just lives here. Your parents are taking you on a trip out of town. Would she like to go too? She accepts your offer without a second thought. She shows up at your door the day your parents leave for the trip. They don’t blink an eye at her, as if she’s invisible, as if there is nothing more than blank space where the smiling girl is. You both talk in the car, looking out the window, while your little brother is absorbed in one of mom’s books. She quietly admits that once upon a time, she knew your parents. That mom and dad once came to the playground before, and she played with them. Mom used to dream of becoming like a bird in the sky, of flying up in one of those large balloons, of seeing the clouds and the seasons pass. One day, she said, she’d bring Hope along with her to lands far far away, and they would watch the sunrise together above the clouds. Dad used to draw such pretty pictures in the dirt with nothing more than a stick, draw out the outline of a head, adorn it with leaves as hair, use pebbles as a nose and grass for a shirt. One day, he told her, his parents would let him buy paints with all the colours of the rainbow, and he’d paint Hope herself in a painting for the world to see. You glance back at dad, who’s always preaching away in church, the same routine day after day, where the only colour is the stained glass painted centuries ago. You look at your mom, who’s always busy taking care of your little brother, who only ever leaves the house to bring you to school, or the park. She’s looking at them too, the way a child looks at a ruined drawing, the way the gardener looks at a withered plant. Once, they were friends, she whispers. Then one day, they left her all alone in the playground and went on with their lives.
Why, you ask, with your childish tone of voice. She just smiles at you with eyes that seem older than her years. Because, she says, they became adults.
You make a small promise to her that when you grow up, when your shoes become too small for your feet and the adults start treating you seriously, you’ll bring her out of the playground, and the two of you can be friends for the rest of your life. You make a bigger promise. That you and your brother will find a way to take her to the sky too. Some giant machine, made out of metal maybe, shaped like a bird, that will let you touch the clouds. She hopes you’ll keep your word.
Hope is your roommate in the college dorm, with her long hair tied in a braid and nails painted yellow. Her outfit clashes with the black walls of your bedroom, long hair clashes with your choppily cut hair, the lemonade in her sparkly bottle much sweeter than the dead-eye coffee in your thermos. Your family tells you that you should befriend her, reach out an olive branch, and become friends, but you don’t want to. Why should you put in the effort if she doesn’t want to be friends with you? You two don’t interact much except when watching the news in the shared living room together. Everything on the news sounds exactly like what’s been echoing in your head throughout the day, but exceedingly worse. Small forest fires growing huge and devouring homes and families, the rising of waves now sweeping houses and settlements, politicians spewing lies to be caught in their cartels. Day after day, dictator after dictator, people who never seem to make the right choice even if it’s a democracy. It never seems to affect her the same way it does you. To her, it’s just mindless drivel and nonsense that she can just choose to ignore. You don’t know why she even bothers watching it on the couch with you.
You watch her enter clubs. She receives only the best rewards, the teachers all praise her, they say she’s what everyone should associate with. Some of the other students follow her mindlessly, taking her talk as if she’s preaching the gospel. You watch her hold their hands excitedly as she cheers on whatever new accomplishments, goals, or test results they achieved. You watch her comfort the ones sobbing at the school staircase, holding tear-stained papers in their hands. She speaks to them in soft words and an understanding tone. Even your family talks highly of her when you’re just trying to eat your dinner in peace. They preach about how important she is for the community, how every community would do well with someone like Hope. You tune out the endless praise after the first few days. They keep on talking to you in an annoyingly earnest tone, but you know that they’re blind to what you’ve seen on the 7 p.m news channel, the wars, the deaths. They don’t have videos of children screaming in war replaying in their minds constantly. Have to scroll past fundraiser after fundraiser of injuries of dead parents of everything that plagues your mind and more. She, especially, wouldn’t know. She passes by you so often in the hallway, looking at you. You don’t know why she bothers doing that.
You hear her screaming at you when you’re moving the boxes with your stuff into the pickup truck. You don’t know why she’s even out here, in the storming rain that pelts down on you. Each drop feels like another sting. It soaks your sweater, that tugs down on you as if thousands of hands are clawing at you, dragging you down. You watch the lights of the road in the dark night, the honks and beeps of traffic. You wonder how it feels to have to hear the sounds of constant bombing, the only light in sight being the flash of your neighbour’s house being blown to smithereens, till there’s nothing left but the blanket their baby was once swaddled in. She keeps on yelling and yelling, like an annoying whistle. You don’t even bother to try to understand what she’s saying. Why bother to listen to a hypocrite, afterall? Someone that preaches to help, to save people, just like the politicians on the news, but it’s all just empty words and actions that are never done. Fooled by the lies they write on college degrees and feed promises of changing the future to the young, that by studying some textbooks and learning skills, they’ll be able to change something.
You scream at her, because she has to hear the truth for once. That for such a seemingly kind person, such a princess, it’s too late to care about you now, to reach out to you now. That if she’s so occupied with other people, that if she just ignores one or two, that doesn’t make it any better. She has her hand open, but she isn’t reaching out to you.
It only occurs to you, right there, that never once did you reach out yours.
Hope is a girl around your age with her hair tied into pigtails, and a smile that can light up even the darkest of nights. She’s been with your community for as long as you can remember, chatting with the elders and waving goodbye to the adults that go out hunting. She’s there when the winter wind is howling outside, snow and frost obscuring your view of the forest, when the grass is covered by layer upon layer of heavy snowfall. The blizzard hasn’t let up in days. She usually stays in the back of the cave where everyone is, but you know even there the numbing cold seeps into her bones. She’s always talking with the kids, trying to cheer them up with stories, games, and rhymes, but they’ve been sleeping more and more lately. You notice how she digs her nails into her fist hard enough to draw blood, all while keeping that smile on her face. There was an expedition a few days ago where a few of the adults decided to venture out into the blizzard anyway. Hope went along with them. You only saw her days later, as she stumbled back into the cave, shaking with exhaustion, as she carried a man on her back. His fingers were blue and cold to the touch. He brought back nothing but frost covered sticks. No matter how tightly she held his hand as everyone tried throwing animal skins on him, no matter how tightly he held hers back, it wasn’t enough to stop his breath from going cold, the last of his warmth ebbing away as his fingers went slack. You watch as your mom gently closes his eyelids, looking past Hope as if she isn’t even there. You watch Hope brush the frost out of her hair with her own blue fingers, gritting her teeth to ignore the chill in her bones. You watch her gaze as they fall to the sticks the man left behind.
The only thing left of his efforts. Was it in vain? Heading out in the cold, all for some wooden sticks? Everyone is still cold. The children are still sleeping more and more. None of you can exit the cave to get something hot. Still, you walk over to her, and pick up the sticks. She’s there besides you as you begin fiddling with them. You try rubbing them together, just as you do with your hands on the colder nights.
There’s a spark. A light. A bright orange– not quite wind, not quite water, a flame of warmth leaping from the smoking wood. You think the word ‘fire’ suits it.
You glance back at Hope. She’s still smiling. It’s not the smile of a young, innocent child who’s never seen the terrors of the world. It’s not the smile of the ignorant, the ones who ignore what they see of the world. It’s the smile of a girl who has had to watch the adults around her freeze to death, who trudged through deep snow to bring back the one survivor, who had to hold his hands as he died. Who had to live through being helpless, grinding her teeth and clenching her fists.
It’s a smile that will never leave her face. Even if the whole world is against her, Hope will never go down easy.
Written by: Hoe Yan
Edited By: Ryan
