It wasn’t real, that connection you held up like something rare. It was only your restless emptiness reaching outward, never inward where truth lived. There was something in you, a rare kind of wrongness, not loud, but steady, growing in the quiet corners You refused to clean. Your habits sank deep, roots of neglect and excuse, feeding on your comfort, tightening around any chance of becoming better. Inside your chest, something lingered, not wounded, but slowly rotting from everything you chose not to face. Your words carried weight, but not wisdom, dirty with judgment, falling on others as if they owed you effort You would never give yourself. You dreamed wildly, expected greatly, Yet moved nowhere. Laziness sat in you like spring, fresh, alive, growing stronger each day You chose not to change. And so you became a tree, Not shaped by storms, but by stillness. Not broken, but unused. A tree that stands alone, roots deep in wasted time, branches stretched with empty wants, leaves gree...
I noticed the thirst on your arrival
before you ever spoke my name.
You did not come bearing love,
You came carrying absence,
a well with no bottom,
a hunger dressed in wounded light.
Your stories.
Ah, those fragile, trembling fables,
stitched from borrowed sorrow,
perfumed with practiced despair.
You have wandered before,
Haven’t you?
Sipping from gentle souls
until they ran dry.
You thought I would open
like the others.
Thought I would gather your broken glass
and bleed for the privilege.
But I saw the seams.
From the first tremor in your voice,
from the way your eyes calculated
while your mouth confessed,
I knew this was a theatre.
A story.
And so — I performed too.
I softened my gaze.
I tilted my head in mercy.
I let you believe
I was unraveling.
All the while
I was mapping you.
This was never love.
It was a strategy.
A board between us,
black and white truths,
where every word was a move
and every silence a trap.
A game.
You mistook my quietness
for foolishness,
and for a vacancy.
My restraint
for lack.
Perhaps to you, I looked fragile,
unarmed, unguarded,
a small figure waiting to be captured.
But even pawns
cross the board
and become something lethal.
I may seem poor in your measure,
useless in your arithmetic of advantage,
But I have never been impoverished in sight.
Never bankrupt in wisdom.
Never a fool.
I let you advance.
Let you believe the center was yours.
Let your arrogance bloom.
Because some victories
are sweetest
When the opponent never sees
The end is approaching.
You came to drain me.
But I am not a vessel without depth.
I am the ocean studying the storm.
And when the final piece falls,
You will understand.
I was never a prey.
I was patient.
And patience, when sharpened,
is checkmate.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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