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 ...
He named it love,
Yet it came hollow,
a vow without a body,
a season that refused to bloom.
No flowers bent toward her name,
no time carved deliberately,
no shared sunlit hours
where footsteps learn from each other.
He kept her hidden in the margins,
visited only when he wanted to.
His tenderness was selective
a door he opened only inward.
He drank from her presence,
fed on her patience,
mistook her silence for consent,
her loyalty for an endless supply.
Love, in his hands, was free access to her.
not devotion, no witness.
He touched her life
without ever standing in it.
But her eyes learned the truth of him:
How affection can imitate warmth
while harboring cold intent,
Cruelty sometimes wears kindness
like a borrowed coat.
So she left quietly,
not from weakness,
but from clarity.
She folded her love back into herself,
rescued it from misuse,
and carried it forward, unbroken.
He never heard the sound of her leaving,
only the absence where she once stood.
And in that silence,
His love was finally named
for what it was:
too small to keep her.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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