A great whooshing sound

The sound that hope makes as it leaves a body isn't like that at all. It's more like the labored sigh of a bed-ridden cancer patient.

The great whooshing sound is what comes flying in to occupy the newly vacated space. Most of the time there are a number of prospective tenants for even dilapidated old walk-ups. Despair, rage, panic, they all take turns squatting. But eventually the credit checks are complete, the deposit checks return marked 'NSF', and the unit is left vacant. And the landlord is absent.

That's how it is for me, anyway. I've never yet been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness other than depression, so maybe my point of view will change upon the discovery of some cluster of misbehaving cells or a shaped charge of genetic plastique. But so far in my life, this is how it is for me, every time.

So when does this harrowing occur for me, when does this horrific expiry of hope reach the stage of sigh and whoosh and Notice To Quit?

Too stupid: the death of love. When it seems like the estrangement of my Other from me has gone beyond a certain point, then hope reaches for the call button and sighs its last.

And just to be clear, this isn't hope for a revival of the relationship. This is hope for survival in some form of the love; I have never yet been able to understand (and surely this is a basic failure, a psychological malformation so obvious that not one of half a dozen therapists has bothered to name it or point it out to me) why love has to end when the relationship does. Why be in a relationship at all? It's like agreeing to hold guns to each other's heads for some period of time, then guessing who'll pull the trigger first. I don't enter relationships that way. I fully expect that something will survive the end of the romantic/sexual/partnership phase of a relationship; otherwise I wouldn't enter into them.

So: am I hoping for too much, or somehow, too little? Do I need to have a gun to my partner's head for it to count as a real relationship with a chance? Is that my problem, that I expect love to survive in some form and am not desperate until it's too late?

Perhaps it is time to lock and load, so as to prevent looters and squatters; property values seem to drop in this neighborhood all the time...