RED PLANET, RED FLAG (Click for poem)

“If I had lost my belief in you, I should have lost all hope.”

–George Elliot, Middlemarch

Poetry Unpacked: On Hope

George Eliot’s line sounds romantic until you sit with its implications. Belief, in this framing, is not separate from hope. It is hope. To lose belief in a person is not to simply reassess them; it is to watch the future burn and collapse. Eliot isn’t describing optimism. She’s describing attachment so total that doubt threatens the entire architecture of it all. Belief becomes a survival structure. Without it, everything else goes dark.

In Red Planet, Red Flag, the speaker prepares for a launch to Mars. It’s a mission she has organized her longing around. This is not a casual dream. It is an identity. Even as warning signs begin to surface, she keeps moving forward. Oxygen levels are off. Her body is sending distress signals. Her intuition is sounding alarms. The data on every screen insists something is wrong. Still, she suits up. Still, she climbs into the cockpit. Still, she believes that the next attempt will be the one that carries her beyond gravity and into something better.

This is not her ignorance. It’s her devotion. Her endless, neurotically hopeful devotion.

This is the mindset of someone who cannot afford to stop believing, because belief has become the thing that makes forward motion possible. To lose faith in the mission would mean losing hope entirely. Eliot understood this: belief doesn’t leave quietly. It takes the future with it.

A rocket launch is one of the most exacting processes humanity has ever engineered. Years of design, testing, recalculating, and redesigning are poured into a single attempt. Hundreds of people monitor weather patterns, fuel temperatures, timing sequences, atmospheric conditions. Every valve, wire, and sensor must align perfectly. At ignition, the structure is placed under extraordinary stress. Controlled violence rattles steel. For a few suspended seconds, no one knows whether the rocket will rise or tear itself apart. 

And sometimes, despite all preparation, it doesn’t go. A sensor flickers out of range. A bolt loosens. A storm drifts too close. The countdown freezes.  A failed launch is not cinematic. It is anticlimactic. Astronauts climb out of the capsule and walk back down the long corridor. They return to waiting and routine. They return to the hollow space between attempts. And still, they come back again. Because hope does not argue with data.

This is where hope becomes complicated.

In The Martian, Mark Watney drinks a cup of hot water and calls it tea. The naming doesn’t change reality, but it keeps him alive another hour. Hope works the same way. A woman surrounded by red flags can still call tomorrow a new beginning. She can tell herself the oxygen readouts are temporary. The pain is manageable. The system will stabilize. If she just climbs back into the cockpit one more time, maybe this will be the launch. There is no confusion here: This is blatant dysfunction. 

This is where Eliot’s belief sharpens into danger. When belief is tied to survival, doubt feels fatal. To stop believing is to lose the future, and therefore hope becomes, essentially, fuel. Hope burns through disappointment. Hope rebuilds itself from the debris of every failed attempt. Hope refuses to concede. Hope is why people keep returning to the launchpad of relationships that have never left the ground. Hope is why the painful data never outweighs the longing. Hope is why warning signs become background noise. It is its own propulsion system: powerful, renewable, and intoxicating.

The promise of ascent matters more than any destination. That the rush, the possibility, the almost, the next time, has eclipsed everything else. That dopamine surge? Who or what can compete with hope?