WA 1, Draft 2

Sometimes the whole world is against you. You can work and work and work towards something, until you are close enough to hold it in your hands, tenderly, like a baby bird with a broken wing or a kitten rescued from a toilet. Then it is snatched away before you can cry out. And you can’t even choke out a protest because you’re late and you have work to do.
You sit there in your hard-backed chair, applause ringing in your ears as the color drains from your face. You wish for the warm embrace of unconsciousness to save you from the sympathetic smiles. And all the while your insides are crumbling, because your best just isn’t good enough.
Your dreams seem to float farther away until they belong to a different version of yourself, cast off like clothes you’ve outgrown. You can see them drifting; dust through a vacuum, sparkling tantalizingly in some invisible breeze like the tail of a slow and blundering comet.
Sometimes hope is a parasite. It can be tiny, almost unrecognizable, or it can grow and grow until it fills you up, takes you over. It can make you into its slave, feeding off your desires until there is no you left anymore. You’ve been consumed. But hope is also a coward. It runs at the first sign of trouble, leaving you shrunken, alone.
Other times the birds sing just for you, and the light falls just right over your hair, transforming it into a thing of beauty. People wait for you to cross the street, smiling broadly like you being in their way is a joke between two friends. Sometimes after it rains the leaves are extra-green and the earth smells sweet. You drop a twenty in the street and a stranger says, “I think you dropped this.” You borrow things from friends and they don’t bother you about when you’re going to give it back.
Sometimes the thing you want the most is the thing that happens, and it’s more perfect than you could have imagined. When you are stranded on a highway, people stop and offer help. Bus drivers whistle softly to themselves, and a group of strangers makes beautiful harmony. You can look up into the bluest fall sky and sigh, because all is right with the world.