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...
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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