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...
He carries two silences.
One waits for him at dusk,
set with familiar walls,
small shoes by the door,
promises aging quietly
in their frames.
The other meets him elsewhere
unannounced, unnamed
where laughter feels lighter,
where his heart remembers
How to open without effort.
One life is built of years and gravity,
held together by habit and hope.
The other is a flame,
brief, necessary,
asking nothing but honesty.
Joy does not live where he sleeps.
It finds him in passing hours,
in glances that cannot linger,
in happiness already mourning itself.
He stands where stone meets boiling water,
learning that stillness can burn.
To move is to destroy.
To stay is to disappear.
He loves deeply
not foolishly,
not loudly
but in the quiet way
That leaves no safe ending.
And so he remains divided,
a man shaped by what he keeps
and by what he cannot let go.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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