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 ...
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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