Wishful thinking

 

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Wishful thinking: That wispy bridge we build between reality and dreams, spun from the silk of our deepest longings. Like morning dew on a spider's web, it glistens with possibility, but remains as fragile as our hopes.

Remember that afternoon I saw my father's hands trembling as he held up the lottery ticket? That wild light in his eyes as he whispered, "This time, baby, this time we're getting out of here." We never did move from that cramped apartment, but I learned something about hope that day - how it tastes like burned coffee at midnight, how it feels like callused fingers crossing themselves in prayer.

Wishful thinking. We carry it like loose change in our pockets, taking it out to turn it over and over when reality gets too heavy. 

The single mother who keeps a designer handbag advertisement taped to her mirror, right next to her daughter's crayon drawings. The old man who buys seeds every spring, though his arthritic hands haven't successfully planted anything in years. 

We're all collecting these small tokens of "maybe," aren't we?

It's in the way we save ticket stubs from terrible first dates, just in case they become the beginning of a love story worth telling. It's in how we hold onto jeans that haven't fit since college, believing that somehow next month will be different. 

These aren't just delusions, they're the small rebellions of the human heart against the tyranny of what is.

Sometimes wishful thinking is the only bread we have to eat. Ask anyone who's ever sat in a hospital waiting room, bargaining with whatever god might be listening. Ask the kid staring at the ceiling of a shelter, imagining it's a sky full of stars. 

These aren't escapes, they're survival.

But there's a cost to living too long in the house of "what if." I've watched friends polish their dreams like precious stones while their real lives gathered dust in the corner. I've done it too, spent years rehearsing conversations with people who would never apologize, perfecting the words for closure that would never come.

Maybe wisdom isn't in abandoning our wishes, but in learning to let them be what they are not maps, but constellations. 

They don't tell us exactly where to go, but they give us something bright to look up to when the road gets dark. And sometimes, just sometimes, when we have the courage to build our lives in the direction of our dreams, we find that reality has been watching our wishful thinking all along, taking notes.