Not really.

When people talk about hope they usually mean a kind of pleasant optimism, a lightness, a sense that things will turn out well.

But the hope I lived in those weeks was not light at all.

It was labor.

It was getting up before dawn to bake cinnamon rolls for a woman who would taste them and feel nothing, and doing it again the next day, and the next.

It was playing the records, and driving to the park, and searching her face every single time for a flicker that did not come, and going to bed disappointed, and waking up and choosing to hope again anyway.