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...
After all these years of breaking quietly,
of carrying pain like a second name
No one has bothered to pronounce me right
I walk through a world
that sharpens its edges on my skin,
asking me to be softer, stronger, smaller—
anything but myself.
Every mirror asks a question
I don’t know how to answer.
I am made of scars
that never learned how to fade,
of nights that stretched too long,
of mornings that arrived without mercy.
I survived them all,
Though survival feels like a language
I’m still learning to speak.
I search for myself
in borrowed smiles,
in half-remembered dreams,
in the silence between my thoughts.
Am I the pain that shaped me?
Am I the hope that refuses to die?
Am I lost?
Am I simply unclaimed?
The world is loud with cruelty,
with hands that take
before they learn how to hold.
I stand in the middle of it,
unsure where I belong,
unsure if belonging
is something people like me are allowed.
Still, beneath the confusion,
something breathes.
A fragile, stubborn truth
that whispers when I am quiet:
I am more than what hurt me.
I am becoming,
even when I don’t know into what.
So what am I?
I am a question still unfolding,
a soul learning its own shape
in a world that tried to erase it.
© 2025 Gloria Penelope
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