You laugh at them. You point your finger and call them a fool. Their silence amuses you, their gentleness becomes your joke, and the crowd joins your laughter as if kindness were weakness. It feels enjoyable today, sweet on your tongue like careless victory. Their patience becomes your stage, their humility your entertainment. But time is a quiet witness. It watches without speaking, It writes its lessons slowly in the turning pages of life. A day will come When laughter turns into tears. The echoes of your mockery will return to your own ears like thunder across an empty sky. Situations will arise without warning, storms without hands to beat you Yet heavy enough to break your pride. Pain will arrive quietly, And you will feel the trembling of a heart that once laughed too loudly. And that fool, that funny person you once mocked, may stand in the distance, not laughing, but witnessing your tears, your shaking voice, Your falling ego. For life has a patient way of bending the tallest p...
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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