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...
I laugh—
not because joy visits me,
but because silence would expose
the ruins I carry inside.
This laughter is crooked, rehearsed,
stitched from fragments of survival,
a sound born where the heart collapsed
And pretense was crowned the only remedy.
Why must life be sculpted this cruel—
where honesty bleeds too openly,
and smiling becomes the final language
spoken by the broken?
I laugh while my soul fractures quietly,
while memories sharpen their knives,
while trust rots into betrayal
And enemies gather wearing familiar skin.
Here, treachery and kinship share a table,
toasting with the same poisoned cup,
and I drink—smiling—
because resistance only deepens the wound.
This smile is not peace,
It is a ceasefire with pain,
a fragile treaty signed by a bleeding heart
that cannot afford another war.
So I laugh—
loud enough to fool the world,
soft enough to not wake the grief,
and broken enough to remind me
that this, too, is life.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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