By Archee Khandelwal
They ask me, "What's the most dangerous thing in the world?"
I reply with a pale smile and numbness in my eyes:
"Hope."
Not the gentle kind that heals,
But the fierce kind that burns—
The kind that carves palaces out of dreams,
That tells you, This is yours, if only you bleed enough.
So you give it everything:
Nights without sleep,
Hands trembling from effort,
With a heart stitched together with belief and blind faith.
You climb, only to find out
It was only ever borrowed by your hope,
And all you hear is
Your dreams bursting—
No warning.
No sound.
Only silence.
Only fall.
And the worst part?
You still want to hope.
Still crave the lie,
Because the void feels colder than betrayal.
It's the cruel trick of believing
You were ever enough
To win what was never yours.