By: Annapurani Vaidyanathan

Hope likes to slither away into the shadows. It loves to sleep beneath greying clouds until a ray of sunshine knocks its socks off and floods the sky with rainbows. It needs you to dot the i’s in impediments and cross the t’s in trust. It wantonly allows you to choose windy moors and rainstorms, and pizzas that don’t come with a thin crust. It sees you buckling down, it sees you ripping your heart apart, it sees you trudging on broken glasses and holding on to barbed wires. It sees you asking the wrong questions, it sees you trying hard to fit in, it sees you transform into an insignificant outlier. It waits until you spot the lone leaf fall, it lets your brain runs amok with self-doubt, it watches you cry yourself to sleep, it stays unruffled as you drag yourself back home, deterred. And then, it raps at your door to remind you it’s still there, sitting pretty like a four-leaf clover on your window sill, waiting to be discovered.