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...
Don’t be naïve.
Do not dress this ruin
in silks of misunderstanding.
There was no hidden tenderness here,
no buried cathedral of feelings,
waiting to be discovered.
I never cared.
Not in the way you deserved,
not with a pulse that quickened at your name,
not with a soul rearranged
by your presence.
I never loved you.
What you mistook for warmth
was rehearsal.
What you held as promise
was practice.
I was only passing through,
a traveller pausing at a lit window,
borrowing its glow
without intention of staying.
A practice was needed.
So was I.
I tried on affection
like a garment before a mirror,
tilted my head
to study how concern might look
if it belonged to me.
I learned the lines,
the softened voice,
the attentive silence,
the careful reach of my hand toward yours.
But the truth,
unyielding as winter,
remains:
I never cared.
Not when you spoke of forever.
Not when your eyes searched mine
for something deeper
than reflection.
There was nothing cruel in me,
only emptiness,
a hollow room
where echoes pretended to be music.
You were real.
I was rehearsing.
And though I stood beside you,
though I spoke the language of closeness,
my heart was elsewhere,
unclaimed,
untouched,
untethered.
Don’t be naïve.
Some people arrive
not as destiny,
not as love,
but as lesson,
passing through the fragile architecture
of another’s hope,
leaving behind the cold clarity
of what was never there.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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