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 ...
I know you are weary
Weary of being cast as the sacrifice
in every unfolding loss,
Weary of tending wounds
Your hands never shaped.
Your heart lies splintered,
a vessel cracked by borrowed pain,
Yet even in its ruin
It continues to beat, defiant and true.
Understand this truth:
You carry no guilt in this suffering.
You were not the error,
only the soul misplaced
among those who mistook your gentleness
for something they could bruise.
Healing is not surrender.
It is the slow remembering of who you are,
a sacred return through silence and time.
Each scar is a scripture
testifying that you endured
what would have undone others.
Remain.
This chapter, heavy with shadows,
is not the whole of your story.
The ache will loosen,
the darkness will thin,
and the pain that names you now
will one day fail to recognize you.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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