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...
It begins in the unseen corners of me,
a fracture without sound,
a quiet distortion in the blood
that learns how to pretend it means something.
Unnecessary anger,
a candle burning in a sealed room,
Consuming the air it depends on,
calling it light
while everything slowly forgets how to breathe.
It arrives without invitation,
wearing the face of importance,
as if every small wound deserved a kingdom of fire,
as if every passing moment
owed it destruction in return.
And I listen to it,
that terrible voice inside the marrow,
hollow but convincing,
telling me that this heat is justice,
that this collapse is a necessary truth
instead of what it really is:
a trembling loss of control
disguised as a purpose.
Rage within,
not thunder, but something worse,
a slow ruin that never finishes falling,
a storm that forgot the sky it belongs to,
so it circles itself endlessly
inside the cage of my ribs.
It is exhausting in its persistence,
this sorrow turned aggressive,
this grief that learned how to bite
instead of weeping.
So annoying,
how it rewrites the world in shades of offense,
how it turns silence into accusation,
how it makes even peace feel suspicious,
like something hiding behind softness
waiting to betray me.
As if it is worth it,
as if breaking the fragile architecture of the self
over moments that will decay anyway
is some sacred proof of being alive,
as if pain multiplied is wisdom,
as if fire makes anything more true.
But life though,
Life does not kneel before this chaos.
It moves forward with indifferent breath,
carrying no memory of the wars I start inside myself,
no echo of the battles that never leave the body.
It does not pause.
It does not witness.
It does not answer.
And that is its cruelty,
or its mercy, I cannot tell anymore.
Because in that indifference,
my rage becomes small.
Almost embarrassing.
A private apocalypse
that the world refuses to acknowledge.
Still it comes back.
It always returns.
Like something already dead
refusing to understand it has no place here anymore.
But somewhere beneath it all,
beneath the collapse and noise and self-consuming heat,
there is a quieter thing,
not peace, not healing, not forgiveness,
just endurance,
sitting in the ruins of me,
waiting without hope,
but waiting still.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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