Last night, when I lay down in bed and closed my eyes, I could see my hope. I was tired, and wanted to go to sleep, but it was so beautiful and unavoidable that I couldn't. I had never seen my hope before, but I knew instantly what it was. I don't know if you've ever seen your hope before, I don't know if anyone else has ever seen their hope before, but it's one of those things that you recognize immediately. I had never thought about seeing my hope before, but, as soon as I closed my eyes, I knew what I was looking at. My hope was a tiny, cylindrical container hovering over a cushion. I knew that the two combined were my hope, that the cushion, which was made of red velvet, with yellow rope lining the edges, was just as important as the container, which looked like a petri dish, or a tin of tobacco, only it was a translucent sky blue, shimmering with starlight. They hovered in the void behind my eyelids and, I think, someone else might have tried to touch them, to feel the softness of that velvet cushion or to pry open that disk, unsure of whether or not it could even be opened, but I knew better. I didn't attempt to reach for it, either with my hands or my mind. Somehow I knew better; I knew that I would be foolish to try to grasp it. But the unconscious, reasonable part of myself knew no such thing, and, as soon as I could name it, as soon as my hope became my hope, as soon as I was moved from an intuitive feeling about the truth of the mysterious apparition in the darkness of my closed eyes to a cold, logical realization naming it as my hope, it disappeared. Again, I don't know if anyone else has ever seen their hope, if they'd know if they had. I don't know if it's a good thing that I did. But it was beautiful, and soothing, and I'm glad I did.