I found myself sitting there, soaking it in. This positive, feel-good message, dripping like honey from the lips of this delicate flower who had her whole goddamn life figured out.
You know the type. The kind that avoids ever acknowledging she’s a woman in a world that’s been handing her things since the day she was born. Beautiful, sure, with her tits practically spilling out of her shirt. The kind of girl whose daddy always took care of everything, who never had to worry about a goddamn thing. She was a tourist, just visiting the miseries of real life for an afternoon, before heading back to her clean, safe little world.
And from that pedestal, she was talking down to me. Preaching. Telling me how to live, how to feel, how to be. Like some cocky Mormon missionary with a perfect smile, trying to sell me a ticket to a heaven I knew was a goddamn lie.
“What if it turns out better than you could have ever imagined?” she was saying, her voice all soft and full of that phony, manufactured hope. “What if all the changes you’re making are leading to something more beautiful?”
I just sat there, nodding, a storm brewing in my gut. She was selling me a fairytale, and I was supposed to just swallow it.
And then, I finally snapped.
A question for you, she says.
“What if it turns out better than you could have ever imagined?”
That’s the kind of question they sell you on a greeting card, right next to the ones with the sad-eyed puppies. It’s a beautiful thought, I guess. For someone else. For the people who still believe in Santa Claus and true love.
“What if all the changes you’re making are leading to something more beautiful?”
Yeah, and what if I flap my arms and fly to the goddamn moon? Things could go wrong, things could go sideways. That’s the only part of that little sermon that sounds like the truth. Because that’s what things do. They go sideways.
But a “beautiful miracle”? The only miracles I’ve ever seen are finding an empty bar stool on a Friday night or waking up without a warrant for your arrest.
So you want me to challenge myself? Next time I’m overthinking, next time I’m doubting, I should put that thought in my mind? “What if things turn out better?”
Here’s a better challenge for you. Next time you’re sitting there, staring at the bottom of a glass, don’t ask yourself what beautiful miracle is waiting around the corner.
Ask yourself this: “What if this is it? What if this is as good as it gets?”
Because it might be. And if you can look that hard, ugly truth right in the eye and still have the guts to order another drink… well, that’s a different kind of miracle altogether, isn’t it?
The Honest Truth is, the world is divided into two kinds of people. The tourists and the natives.
The tourists are the ones like that girl. The ones with the clean hands and the easy smiles, the ones whose daddies always paid the bills. They visit the real world, the one full of dirt and pain, like it’s a goddamn zoo. They look at the animals in the cages, and they offer up these cheap, feel-good philosophies like peanuts. “What if it all turns out better than you imagined?” they chirp. It’s a beautiful thought, if you’ve never had to worry about where your next meal is coming from.
The natives? That’s the rest of us. The ones who live in the cage. We know the score. We know that “hope” is a luxury we can’t afford. The point of that story is to show the absolute, insulting gap between those two worlds. It’s about the contempt a man who has actually lived a life feels for the pretty, empty words of someone who has only ever read about one.
The point isn’t to be a miserable bastard. It’s to be a realist. The real strength isn’t in hoping for a “beautiful miracle.” The real strength is in looking at the hard, ugly, unchangeable truth of your own shitty situation, and still having the goddamn guts to get out of bed in the morning.
That’s the point. It’s about rejecting their cheap, sweet-tasting poison and learning to swallow your own bitter medicine, straight. Because at least it’s honest.
