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 ...
When they return,
do not mistake the echo for devotion.
It is not your soul they seek.
It is the harvest they once abandoned.
Their footsteps do not carry love;
They carry appetite.
Absence did not awaken tenderness in them.
It merely revealed how much they lost access to.
Do not romanticize the knock upon your door.
It is not long-bending in humility;
It is a desire retracing its map
to reclaim what once fed it.
If love had lived in them,
It would not have departed so easily.
Love does not loosen its grip
only to tighten it when it's convenient.
Understand this:
Their return is a strategy, not a confession.
It is ambition clothed as remorse,
hunger disguised as affection.
Close the door, not with anger,
but with clarity.
Seal it with self-respect.
Sweep the threshold of their shadows.
What once walked away
has already proven its loyalty to departure.
Clear the path.
Let the dust of manipulation settle into memory.
Make space where sincerity can breathe.
For one day,
a presence unburdened by agenda
will approach that same entrance,
not to extract,
not to consume,
but to dwell.
And when that knock arrives,
Your spirit will not tremble in confusion.
It will recognize peace
as something that does not leave
and return only when in need.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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