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 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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