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 ...
She was not always like this,
not always distant,
not always cold in the eyes.
Once,
she loved like fire,
like something that believed
It would never burn out.
But fire,
when handled wrong,
leaves scars.
They broke her,
not all at once,
but piece by piece,
promise by promise,
until trust became
something she could no longer recognize.
No one stayed
long enough
to help her gather herself back.
So she stopped trying.
Now she doesn’t fall,
She calculates.
Doesn’t feel,
She plays.
Love, to her,
is no longer sacred.
It’s a game board,
And she knows every move.
She smiles like she means it,
speaks like she cares,
touches like she feels,
but it’s all strategy,
all distance dressed as closeness.
She learned from the best,
from the ones
Who broke her first?
Now she leaves before she’s left,
hurts before she’s hurt,
wins before she can lose.
A heartbreaker, they call her.
But no one asks
what it took
to turn her into one.
Because somewhere beneath it all,
buried deep wound,
a scar inside a broken heart,
where no one reaches,
Behind it all lies a girl
who once believed in love,
a girl who got played…
and never healed.
That's a girl who mastered the game,
to break men's hearts.
It's a revenge she vowed to keep.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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