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, right? 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.

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. And hope has one extraordinary advantage over evidence: hope lives in the future.

The oxygen gauge can only tell her what is happening now.

The promise tells her what will happen next.

That time shift matters. She does not have to deny that the cabin is losing oxygen if she can convince herself that the leak is temporary. Every failure can be absorbed into the larger story of eventual success: a setback, a misunderstanding, a rough patch, something they are working through.

This is how someone can remain exquisitely aware of what is wrong and still stay. She sees the red flags. She simply believes the promises more.

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.

Perhaps that is the cruelest thing about this particular kind of hope: eventually the Mars in her head becomes more real than the rocket beneath her. She knows that version of Mars intimately. She has been promised it. She has pictured the atmosphere, the landscape, the weightlessness giving way beneath her feet. She knows who they will be when they finally arrive. Every failed launch hurts precisely because she can see the destination so clearly.

So she returns.

The countdown begins again. The promises begin again. The instruments begin their warnings again. And hope translates every alarm into not yet.

That dopamine surge? Who or what can compete with hope when hope has been allowed to write the future?

Perhaps that is why losing hope can feel more frightening than staying inside something that hurts us. We are not only grieving what has happened. We are being asked to relinquish everything we were promised would happen next.

The astronaut does not remain in the cockpit because she cannot see the red flags. She remains because she can still see Mars.