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 ...
There is a version of me
I buried without a name,
no stone, no ceremony,
just silence pressed into the ground
with trembling hands.
No one saw the funeral.
It happened behind steady eyes,
between breaths, I pretended to be calm,
beneath a voice that said I’m fine
until it almost sounded true.
That version of me
cried in places no one visits,
in the pause before sleep,
in the echo after laughter,
in the spaces between words
I never dared to say aloud.
I wrapped them in quiet.
Folded their pain into smaller shapes,
tucked it neatly behind ribs
where it could ache politely,
where it wouldn’t disturb anyone.
They had a softer heart,
that one,
too open, too willing
to believe hands would stay
Once they learned the weight of holding.
They loved without armor.
Trusted without maps.
Broke without noise.
And when the cracks grew louder than I could bear,
I chose stillness over shattering.
I chose to bury them
before the world could finish the job.
But sometimes,
in the hush of an ordinary moment,
I feel them.
Not gone.
Just quiet.
A pulse beneath the surface,
a whisper through old wounds,
a ghost made not of absence
but of everything that once felt too much.
They are still there,
the one I buried softly,
holding all the tears I never let fall,
carrying the pieces I couldn’t keep.
And I wonder
If healing is not forgetting them,
not leaving them in the dark,
But learning to kneel
at the place I left them,
And I finally say:
You didn’t deserve to disappear.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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