I could feel the air around me shift. I started breathing differently, seeing distinctively and hearing abnormally. I noticed things I never noticed, and I could feel the blood in my veins flowing in the opposite direction. 

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But there will always be a stain, a remnant of everything I couldn't have. Or maybe a part of something I did have all to myself, be it that small note that my once-upon-a-time lover wrote to me or my forlorn heart. I lost them later on, as I moved through life. The note is displaced, my heart is etched with someone else’s name, and I'm in a different setting, with different people and different rooms and different roads. 

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I transitioned into heartbreak and melancholia earlier than I imagined. I experienced how it feels to exist aimlessly, when everyone around me learnt to dream of a future. I made enemies with myself when people of my age were learning to make friends. I was morphing myself into someone I hate when all the people around me were learning to fall in love. 

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I didn't give up on hope but transitioning phases felt like hope giving up on me. And on nights that got too heavy with whiskey lying on the floor and every opportunity asking me to drift further away from myself, I fought and lost battles consecutively. 

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Maybe there is a war that I've yet to win, maybe there's a conclusion I've yet to derive, and maybe there's a chapter I've yet to enter. 

Maybe I'm in between words, existing in the spaces, cutting ties with all the could haves and should haves. Maybe hope isn't really gone but just lost and maybe not every memory is meant to be reminisced, just meant to be boxed up. 

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Maybe life is like Tim Robbins’ words, “Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies” and maybe there's some truth in that.