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...
Happiness used to walk ahead of me.
Not run—
just lead.
Quiet. Certain.
Like it knew the way.
Life was gentle then.
Peace didn’t have to be explained.
I breathed without checking my chest,
laughed without rehearsing it,
slept without bargaining with tomorrow.
I didn’t know
those days were teaching me
what I’d later miss.
Misery didn’t arrive screaming.
It never does.
It slipped in through familiarity,
wearing the face of “just a phase,”
moving the furniture of my life
one inch at a time
until nothing felt like home.
Now sadness walks beside me—
not ahead,
not behind—
close enough to remind me
that something was lost.
I carry memories like photographs
with the color fading.
Proof that I once lived softly.
Proof that peace knew my name.
And some nights,
that’s what hurts the most—
not that I’m hurting now,
But that I know
Exactly how good it used to be.
© 2025 Gloria Penelope
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