Love was never a heartbeat. It was the echo left behind after the heart forgot why it was still beating. It arrived wearing another person's face, its hands stitched together from promises that had already begun to rot. I welcomed it. Not because it was kind, but because loneliness knows how to mistake a wolf for warmth. Every smile it offered cast a longer shadow. Every whispered "forever" fed another ghost sleeping beneath my ribs. The thought of love is a clever liar. It builds cathedrals from broken mirrors, then asks us to kneel before our own reflections, calling the illusion destiny. How eagerly we obey. We water flowers that grow from graves, write poems to people who never truly existed, and embrace memories still unborn. Love watches. Silent. Patient. Like a spider waiting in the center of a web woven from hope. It never forces us inside. It simply lets us believe the silver threads are rays of morning light. By the time we understand, the sky has forgotten our ...
You held my hand with borrowed warmth,
Eyes rehearsed, smiles well trained,
Every word sounded like devotion,
Yet carried the echo of something feigned.
You played the part so confidently,
As if truth had no right to speak,
Loving me loudly in public scenes,
While sincerity grew thin and weak.
But I noticed the pauses, the distant gaze,
The affection timed, the care on cue,
Love doesn’t calculate when to appear.
And that’s how I knew it wasn’t you.
So hear this now, a call for change:
Do not offer hearts you cannot give.
Deception may imitate love for a while,
But truth decides how we truly live.
And know this too—I’m not in love,
Not with the version you tried to be.
My heart has learned the sound of real love,
And it speaks a different language to me.
I’ve found someone whose love doesn’t perform,
No masks, no scripts, no need to pretend.
They love me in silence, in effort, in truth
And that’s where my heart will remain, in the end.
© 2025 Gloria Penelope
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