Last Friday, as I watched the City of Light descend into darkness—Paris' victim count skyrocketing with each refresh of my browser—I felt the flame of hope within me flicker out.

Suffocating under the weight of humanity's hatred, I looked up from my laptop and wondered: what has become of this place we call home?

I lay awake in bed that night, unable to quell the reminder that for each of my heartbeats, somewhere in the world there was a pitter-patter that had been forever silenced—and there was nothing I could do to change that. Time, after all, rewinds for no man. And yet, tragedies are not isolated incidents of the past, but rather recurrent inevitabilities of the future. This, perhaps, is what frightens me most of all.

After hours of tossing and turning, I finally drifted off, lost. I needed to believe that the world was still a beautiful place, that the good outweighed the evil, that one day, my children would pore over the tragedies of my generation in their history textbooks much as I pored over the Holocaust in mine and ask, “How, Mommy? How did that happen?"—unable to fathom a society in which cruelty was rendered normalcy.

More than anything, I needed hope.

And so, when the sun peeked through my window the next morning, I rolled out of bed and rekindled the flame.

As golden rays streamed through my pane, I remembered that even in the darkest of times, there will always be light. We must always believe this.

We must.

"Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place."

In the dark hours, they can take our security. They can take our innocence. They can take our loved ones.

They can even take our tomorrow.

But this hope, they can never take from us. As long as we hope, we are human. And as long as we believe in change, there exists a future worth living—worth fighting—for.