There is a place inside you No map has ever traced, a quiet room behind the ribs where light forgets to stay. No one sees it when you smile, No one hears it when you speak. It moves beneath your laughter like a river running deep. It is yours alone to carry, not carved for other hands, a language made of silence Only your soul understands. Some mornings it is heavier, a stone you cannot name, And still you rise and wear your life as if it were the same. But pain, it does not leave you when ignored or pushed away, it waits within the folds of time, it learns you day by day. It is not your enemy, though it cuts without a sound; it is the truth you buried but still lives underground. And yes, there are nights it breaks you, when endurance feels too wide, when even breath feels borrowed And there is nowhere left to hide. Yet somehow you continue, not because you do not fall, but because within the breaking You still answer life’s call. You learn to walk beside it, not beneath it, not above...
It didn’t rise from mountains or maps,
but from inside my chest—
a quiet rumble I ignored
until the ground split open.
One moment, there were plans:
calendars neat with future dates,
dreams folded carefully
like clothes waiting to be worn.
The next—
lava.
Heat rushed through everything I loved,
burning paths I thought were permanent,
melting the shape of who I was
and who I thought I’d be.
Nothing survived untouched.
The air grew thick with ash,
every breath heavy with loss.
I searched for the old roads,
but they were buried,
sealed beneath what I could not undo.
There is a terror
in knowing normal will not return—
that the life before the eruption
exists only as a story now,
told in the past tense.
I stand in the aftermath,
shattered, still warm with grief,
watching smoke rise
from the ruins of my intentions.
Even silence feels broken.
Yet somewhere beneath the hardened black,
The Earth is still alive—
not the same, never the same,
but waiting.
And though I cannot imagine green again,
Time has a way
of teaching stone how to breathe.
© 2025 Gloria Penelope
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