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...
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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