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 ...
You never listened to my truth,
Only the echo that pleased the room,
Never the voice that trembled alone
In nights that refused to end.
You did not witness the hours without sleep,
Where darkness rehearsed my memories,
Where trauma breathed beside me,
Heavy, intimate, impossible to escape.
You never felt the weight of betrayal,
The slow corrosion of trust,
How disdain sharpens itself quietly
And settles deep within the chest.
What I carried would have shattered you
It taught me endurance the hard way,
Bending my spirit into survival
While the world mistook silence for ease.
Wake from the slumber of comfort,
From the blindness of distance and ease,
Set down your certainty and listen
All I ask is to be heard.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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