Hope is a dangerous game we play...

For a good solid year, I hoped for someone to come back to me. Then for another 6 months, I tried to be real about it. Now, I'm in a place where I want to hope but I know the danger it brings.

Hope entails putting your beliefs, life, and ideas on hold while you wait to see the outcome and wishing that it turns out like you want. Hope is dangerous. We wait on things that may never happen or may turn out very badly. We hang ourselves up on a potential possibility with no probability. The danger is the waiting.

Hope is good in times of despair. But when does hope go from being a good thing, to ruining the life we have now got to live?

I think we're all entitled to have a little hopeless hope in our lives from time to time, but we all need to reach a point where we see that hoping is doing any good anymore.

So, back to my place where I'm at right now... I have REALLY strong feelings that this might be different than before, but it never has been different in the last two years so should I quit hoping?

Am I so wrong to hope that things might actually be real when he says he misses me and is remembering old things about us and he tells me I'm on his mind like crazy and he wants to hold me and he wants to see me and he wants to respect my choice to say no to sex and he asks for my opinion and he texts me at night and in the morning and he genuinely is having a conversation for once with me?

Or have I manufactured this all out of my attitude? I did something different this time. I haven't pushed for him to always talk. I've simply been cheerful and cute and he's acting the same. I guess you get back what you give.

So this begs the question, have I been hoping for something without giving it a real chance to be different? Is my attitude the thing that was in the way the whole time? Did stopping my expectations change what he wants?

The last big thing that I've come to see is this. When Chris and I broke up, it was a mess for everyone involved. His family severely disapproves of me now and so do his old friends. My family isn't too fond of Chris either. What Chris and I have between us is great in theory and over text, but the reality comes inevitably and I think we both see that there is so much disapproval of us being together that it has tainted any future relationship if there ever was such a thing. This is something I can't fix. I can't take back what happened, nor would I want to. I'm happy on my own and so is he, but the fact still stands that after all this time we always come back to each other in some way. Maybe, just maybe, my hope, dangerous as it is, has kept something special safe from all the pain surrounding the thing that was US.