If I had to try and make some sense out of it I guess I would have to say that I worry I’m going to be waiting so long I’ll forget what I’m waiting for. Does that make sense? You worry you’ll forget what you’re waiting for and then you worry one day you’ll forget that you are waiting for anything at all. Maybe you’ll get up one day and go to work, and after work you’ll come home and sit down in front of the TV, for instance. Or the radio or whatever. And you turn the volume down because all of a sudden you have the sense that something’s slipped your mind. And you sit there and wonder about it for a while, your interest is piqued, you know there’s something…there’s something, but what is it? And finally, you just shake it off. you turn the volume back up. You figure you must have just left something at work, or forgot to pick something up from the grocery store, or something like that – something trivial. Surely nothing important. So you shake it off. But what it is – what it really is – and this is the part that gets to me when I start thinking about it – what it really is is this is the exact moment in your life that you’ve forgotten you’re waiting for something.

So then, without even knowing it, this is when you’ve lost your hope.

Extract from Well by Matthew McIntosh