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...
They named her their daughter-in-law.
before she learned her own name.
Marriage found her young,
not as a choice,
but as a destination already decided.
Her hands were trained
before her mind was asked.
Sweep. Cook. Obey.
Fetch water before sunrise,
carry firewood before thought.
This is the alphabet she was taught.
Village dust settled into her thoughts,
not because she lacked vision,
but because no one let her look past the hills.
Days repeat like commands—
live, work, sleep, repeat—
a body moving on borrowed instructions.
She lives under rules that never asked her consent.
Love is a duty.
Silence is respect.
Endurance is praised as strength.
She moves like a machine
that never learned it could choose its direction.
The city is a rumor.
Education, a foreign language.
Opportunity, a story told to other women,
in other words,
with better luck at birth.
And yet—
this is the cruelest part—
No one knows what she could have been.
No one tested her mind.
No one stretched her curiosity.
No one gave her light
or freedom,
or a book that asked questions instead of giving orders.
She might have been brilliant.
Strategic.
Inventive.
A voice meant for rooms beyond mud walls.
A talent large enough for the globe,
compressed into survival.
What a world she is living in-
not because she is small,
But because her world was made small for her.
And a good life, in a place she lives,
means learning how to live well under marriage rules,
To live like a slave and disappear
without ever being called lost.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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