Losing Hope

6

Hope didn't wake up tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. Weeks went by, my brother made me go back to school, but I wasn't really there. As often as I could I would go see Hope at the hospital.

I was sitting beside Hope's bed, holding her hand in mine and talking to her.

"It's all my fault Hope" I cried "if I hadn't have gotten mad at you and made you leave..." There was a knock on the door. "Come in" I said meekly, wondering who I could be. Mrs. Kararro or the nurse would have just came in without knocking.

The door opened and a tall guy, maybe 18 or 19 walked in.

"Um hi" he said "is this Hope Kararro's room?" He said Hope's name uncertainly.

I nodded

"Well you see, I just wanted to apologize" he started and my face wrinkled in confusion.
"Maybe I should introduce my self first. I'm Dante, and I was the car that did this" he gestured apologetically to Hope.

I didn't know what to say. I wanted to scream and yell at him. But the way he acted he seemed so sorry. I just stood there.

He shuffled his feet and continued. "I just want to say that, she should be the one standing here right now, not me. Oh and I um, brought some flowers." He said handing them to me.

After a while of him standing there awkwardly I sighed, and told him it wasn't his fault, and if anyone's, it was mine. We talk for a while longer and he was actually a really sweet guy, and after exchanging numbers he left, and Hope's mom came back and told me to go home.

Dante was a really nice, but he had a sad story of his own. His dad had left his mom when he was four, and she had struggled to raise him and his sister with what little money she made. She remarked by the time he was ten, but she died of a heart attack. Dante's new dad was abusive, and an alcoholic, and he would beat Dante so bad that sometimes he would skip school and hide in an old tree house.

At 12, police arrested his dad, but not before he beat Dante's older sister to death after she got pregnant.

Dante was put in many a foster home, since he was always the 'troubled bad boy'. He got into drugs and kind of just gave up on his life.

He said he shouldn't be the one who was still alive. That there wasn't anything for him in life anyway.

I don't know, it just really made me think. He has to carry all this, and he feels like Hope's death is his fault too. How can a person carry all that without breaking?

"It's easier if you don't love" he had said. "The more you care about someone, or something, the more it hurts, and when you have so much pain, you don't really have room for anything else in your heart."