Lope's Thoughts

Just when I set my eyes on you, the sky Forgot its blue and learned another shade; The moon came loose and wandered through the night, As if it had mistaken you for day. The stars fell slowly, one by one, like rain, And landed trembling somewhere in my chest; The clocks grew wings and fled across the plain, While every breath forgot what came up next. The trees began to whisper through their leaves, Speaking in a language only silence knew; A river lifted itself above the reeds, And carried broken pieces of the moon. I saw a thousand sleeping oceans rise, Their silver waves unfolding in your eyes; Old constellations opened like wounds, And unfamiliar heavens changed their skies. The earth beneath my feet became a dream, Its roads dissolved into a drifting stream; I reached for you, but distance turned to smoke, And something in my sleeping heartbeat woke. Your shadow crossed the sunlight on the wall, Yet somehow it was taller than the night; I watched my lonely yesterday dissolve, As t...

Why, but why don’t you feel her pain? Do you think she chose the tears, the sleepless nights, the quiet rain? Why, but why do you look away when her smile is only hiding what she cannot say? Do you think it’s easy to carry all that weight, to laugh as nothing happened while breaking at the gates? Why, but why when she whispers, “I’m fine,” do you believe the words and never read between the lines? She doesn’t need your pity. She doesn’t need your shame. She only wants somebody to understand her pain. She doesn’t need your judgment, she doesn’t need your hate, she doesn’t need your evil words adding to the weight. She doesn’t need your whispers, your cruelty, or your blame, she’s already fighting battles you will never know by name. Do you think it’s easy to be strong every day, to hold a heart together while watching it decay? Why, but why can’t you see her scars? Some wounds don’t bleed, some battles leave no marks. And maybe one day you’ll finally understand, that she wasn’t asking f...

Look at yourself. Not the face the mirror has been rehearsing for years, but the one hiding under your skin. Look closely. There is a small door behind your left eye. You have never opened it. Inside, an old version of you is sitting at a table made from yesterday, turning pages with hands that have forgotten their own shape. Open the pages. Do not ask who wrote them. Some words were written by storms. Some by strangers. Some by nights that refused to become mornings. And some, some were written by you while you were asleep. Turn the page. A black sun is hanging from the ceiling. It has no heat, only memories. Underneath it, your forgotten dreams are growing teeth. They are waiting for you to remember their names. Turn another page. There is a road running through your childhood. It has no beginning. It has no end. Only footprints. You follow them until they suddenly become yours. Then you realize you have been walking backward your entire life. Look at yourself. The book is breathing ...

 After the change, you will speak of her as though she were once a woman and then, without warning, the moon swallowed her name. You will say, “I knew her.” And people will believe you. Why wouldn't they? You have photographs. You have her handwriting sleeping inside old drawers. You have the sound of her laughter trapped somewhere behind your ribs. You have the scar where her goodbye forgot to become a wound. You will say, “She was once mine.” But you will not understand what “mine” means anymore. Because she will have changed into something language cannot hold. One morning her shadow will grow wings. Her reflection will stop copying her. She will look into a mirror and find an ocean staring back. And when she walks away, the ground will not remember where her feet touched it. You will watch her disappear through a door that was never there before. You will run toward it. There will be no door. Only a wall. Only your own hands bleeding against yesterday. After the change, she wil...

Some smiles are strange little planets floating where a face should be, with tiny moons orbiting their edges and oceans nobody can see. You look at them and think... sunlight. But sometimes there is an entire winter sleeping behind those teeth. Some smiles carry houses with no doors. Inside them, old memories sit at the kitchen table, drinking cups of silence that were never meant to be served. Some carry forests growing upside down inside the chest, their roots tangled around forgotten names, their branches reaching through the ribs toward a sky that does not exist. And some smiles, God, some smiles, carry oceans. Deep black oceans where yesterday's tears have turned into silver fish swimming around the wreckage of things that once mattered. Nobody sees them. Nobody sees the little ships sinking behind someone's eyes. Nobody hears the bells ringing underwater. Nobody knows that a person can walk through a crowded room while carrying an entire abandoned city inside their heart....

Down where the crooked hills descend, beneath a moon that will not bend, there lies a cave with teeth of stone, that opens only when alone. No path is marked upon the ground, yet somehow every road is found. The grass lies flat before its mouth, as though something crawled straight out. They say the cave was once a mine. They are lying. There are no tools inside. No lanterns. No bones. Only footprints. Thousands of them. All facing inward. I heard the cave call out my name, but not in a human voice. It sounded like my mother speaking from underwater. Then my own voice answered from the dark. “Come closer.” I stepped inside. The entrance vanished behind me. Not closed. Vanished. The walls were breathing. Slowly. Deeply. Each breath pulled the air from my lungs, and when the cave exhaled, I heard whispers crawling through the cracks. My name. My name. My name. Then something whispered a name I had never heard before. And the walls went silent. I walked deeper. The cave grew warmer. Then ...

 I will love you like that, like the pillow that remembers the shape of your head after you have left. Like the bedroom door that opens a little wider when it hears your footsteps. Like the little blue fish sleeping inside a teacup you have never touched, quietly turning in circles as though it knows how many times I have missed you. I will love you without asking why your shadow sometimes stays beside me after you have gone. It stands near the bed. It does not speak. It only watches the door. When you are tired, I will lie beside you and listen to your breathing. Sometimes, between one breath and the next, I will hear another. I will not tell you. I will simply move closer until there is no space for anything else. I will love you like a key that has been warm from another person's hand for a hundred years. Like a photograph that changes slightly whenever you kiss me. If your heart becomes a strange house, I will enter carefully. I will learn which floorboards remember your childh...

The dice is still rolling. I heard it last night inside the belly of the moon, knocking against its silver bones while something beneath the earth counted the numbers. One. Two. Three. I looked outside. The stars were gone. Not hidden. Gone. As if someone had reached into the sky and quietly stolen them. You stood beside your palace wearing the proud smile of someone who believed the universe had chosen him. “Look what I have built.” You pointed at the towers. You pointed at the gold. You pointed at the doors that opened whenever you approached. But behind you, the shadows were whispering. They knew something you did not. The river did not ask your permission before becoming a river. The sun did not read your name before entering the morning. And the wind has never stopped to ask who deserves to breathe. You simply woke one day with food on your table, a roof above your head, and enough light in your hands to believe you had created the sun. Grace is a strange creature. It enters quiet...

You thought of me until it hurt, or so the night tells me when it leans against my window with your voice in its teeth. You thought of me in the quiet hours, when the clocks forgot how to move and every shadow in your room wore my shape. You remembered my name like a wound remembers the knife. But you forgot how you pushed me away. Funny, isn't it? How memory becomes selective when the heart is trying to sleep peacefully beside its own cruelty. You remember my hands. The way they reached for you when the world became too cold. You remember my laughter, the little warmth I left behind in the corners of your life. You remember the way I looked at you as though you were something worth staying for. But you don't remember how you became ruthless. How your words slowly grew teeth. How every conversation became a hallway with no exit. How you learned exactly where I was soft and pressed there until I stopped bleeding where you could see it. You don't remember the doors you slamme...

There is a dead moon buried somewhere behind my eyes. I have been carrying it for years, a pale little corpse orbiting the ruins of my thoughts. Sometimes I hear it knocking. Not from outside, from somewhere deeper. As if there is a door inside my skull and something on the other side has been waiting for me to remember its name. But I have forgotten how to remember. My mind is an abandoned house at the edge of a city that no longer exists. The windows are open, but nothing enters. No birds. No wind. Not even the dust has the courage to stay. There are photographs hanging on the walls of people I have never been. In one, I am standing beside a black ocean, holding a lantern filled with dead stars. In another, I am smiling. I don't recognize that kind of cruelty. At night, the hallways rearrange themselves. The ceiling becomes the floor. The floor becomes a mouth. The stairs descend into places that have no depth. I walk downward for what feels like centuries and arrive at the same ...

Yesterday did not end. It merely changed its clothes. At midnight it crawled out from beneath my bed wearing the face of something I had buried alive. It followed me into morning. I could hear it dragging its darkness behind me, a wet, invisible thing with no name and too many hands. The sun rose like a wounded god. Still, the dark remained. It had learned the shape of my shadow. Everywhere I went, it arrived first. At the bus stop, it sat inside the empty seat beside me. At the café, it stirred my coffee with the finger of someone I no longer remember. At work, it whispered beneath the fluorescent lights, You have been here before. I had. I have been everywhere I am afraid to return to. The past is a country without borders. You can leave the house. You can change your name. You can move cities. You can bury photographs beneath the floorboards. But memory has no geography. It follows. It follows. It follows. Sometimes I wake with the taste of yesterday inside ...