Should I Stay or Should I go Now?

I think about hope a lot these days. When it's helpful, when it's not. How to tell the difference. I'm none the wiser for all my ruminations, but I'm hopeful one day I'll have a better understanding of when to keep going and when to walk away (see what I did there?) 

And on the second day of flashing, here is what I wrote. 

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She tricked herself into making it smaller. Shrank it down with critical thoughts. Trimmed the edges with intellectualization. 

She woke each day determined to keep herself safe, keep her expectations reasonable. So she kept her eyes down and tried not to look around. Tried not to see what others had made possible.

She shut out the thrum of her blood, the clutch of her stomach, when accidentally - unsupervised - her mind drifted back to the familiar words and images, drifted back to the well worn places she had created with care.

But hope burned bright, searing her insides. Refusing to die.