Losing Hope by Leslie J. Sherrod

couldn’t even remember the last time she even said his name. Neither she nor my dad—nor, really, anybody in my life—knew what had become of my marriage to the man who had changed some core part of me.
    I knew my mother was waiting to hear the story, that she would be patient another ten or twenty years if necessary. All for the right to say, “I told you so.”
    I refused to give her that pleasure. I had my pride. Actually, not pride, I realized in that moment.
    Hope.
    I was bereft of all pride, dignity, and confidence when it came to the secret places in my heart. I’d loved one man, and he left me, he said, because he loved me so much that he could not let the world I lived in be a place in which evil could prevail. I guessed that was what he wanted me to tell his son. So that was what I’d spent the last fourteen years doing. Trying to convince a young boy that it was okay for his heart to bleed in the name of global peace and justice.
    Justice.
    What did that even mean?
    The rooms in my heart had been swept clean and left bare, waiting for RiChard’s return. No pretty pictures or fancy furniture to fill the space. All I had left was a little bit of hope that one day the rooms would be filled with something again. I wasn’t even sure what that something was, but I knew that if I ever lost hope, I’d lose whatever else I had left going for me.
    It made sense now why the past two days had left me so winded. My hope was leaving me, leaving me slowly like air in a balloon with a pinprick hole. Active deflation. Hope that my life and the rooms in it would be filled again. Would mean something beyond the nine-to-five grind. The daily monotony. The broken dreams. The shattered promises.
    The love found and then lost.
    I’d worked hard—exceedingly, painfully hard—to get to where I was.
    And my life still felt so empty.
    It had taken a while to realize this: I was losing my hope that I would one day feel full again.
    Feel purposed. Like I had a reason to really be here. Like the world was truly different because I had been born. Like I had the power to change things—to heal, to help, to hold.
    That was what RiChard had made me believe. About me, about himself. About everyone having that potential.
    And then he left me.
    He left me.
    He. Left. Me.
    Hope was leaving me. Hope that what he’d said, that what I’d chased, that what I’d believed had not been a lie.
    There is nothing worse than losing hope. . . .
    Mrs. Monroe had said that just yesterday, and the pronouncement felt familiar to me, as if the words that had been bouncing around randomly—endlessly—in my empty little spaces had just finally come together to make perfect sense.
    â€œI’m going to find Hope.” The mission formed even as I spoke it.
    I did not know if Hope Diamond was a real person or just a broken fragment of Dayonna’s scarred imagination, but finding Hope, whoever or whatever that was, now felt like a singular mission for me to fulfill.
    Finding Hope gave me purpose.
    â€œSienna, are you even listening to me?” my mother flat out yelled into the phone. “I said I want you and Roman to come over for dinner on Sunday. I’m going to tell Yvette to come with Sylvester too. I can’t have my family fighting each other, and we’re going to reconcile all these differences over my chicken and dumplings.”
    All these differences.
    My mother did not know the half of them. But she knew she had me hooked. Nobody in their right mind ever turned down Isabel Davis’s chicken and dumplings, even if it meant ducking and dodging questions I knew I was not going to answer.
    â€œOkay, Mom. I love you. I’ll see you Sunday. I gotta go.”
    â€œMmm—hmm.” My mother’s version of “Good-bye.”
    I disconnected the call and pressed my foot down on the accelerator. The traffic on 695 was starting to break.
    Good.
    I was on my way