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...
Life descends upon me
as if my name carries a hidden indictment,
a sin whispered into the marrow of my being
Before I learned how to stand.
Each dawn arrives already sharpened,
prepared to wound without explanation.
There is a secret ache lodged within me,
a quiet inhabitant of flesh and bone.
It burrows deeper with each passing day,
unbaptized by mercy,
teaching my body the vocabulary of suffering
one pulse at a time.
I ask why until the word thins to breath.
It rises toward Heaven,
only to fall back upon my chest,
unanswered,
as though the sky has chosen silence
as its final language.
My prayers gather like unsent confessions,
stacked at the altar of waiting.
I kneel daily, voice frayed,
wondering if God is listening
Or if faith is simply learning
How to endure being unheard.
Still, I do not abandon the floor of prayer.
Hope limps, but it remains.
My soul stays open,
not from strength,
but from exhaustion that refuses to die.
I ask now only for mercy
not clarity.
For healing
not absolution.
For ease
a gentler weight upon my days.
And if You hear me, God,
let this be enough:
to soften what hurts,
to steady what trembles,
and to grant me the grace
to survive this life
without losing myself.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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