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 ...
You were my everything,
not in the careless way people say it,
but in the quiet, consuming way
a thought becomes a home.
You lived in my mind
like a conqueror,
not with force,
But with a presence so strong
Everything else surrendered.
Every corner of me
spoke your name in silence.
Every plan I made
had your shadow beside it.
You were my forever,
or at least
That’s what I carved into my future
without asking for permission.
A soulmate, I believed,
was someone who stayed,
Someone who chose you
even when the world shifted.
But you…
You left.
Not loudly.
Not with answers.
Just enough absence
to echo through everything I was.
And something inside me
didn’t break;
It rewrote itself.
Losing you changed me.
My thoughts no longer wander
where you once were.
The softness I carried
grew edges I never planned for.
I stopped seeing the world
through “us”
and started surviving
through “me.”
Even my days feel different,
my habits,
my laughter,
the way I exist in silence.
I am not who I was
when you were here.
And maybe that’s the quiet tragedy,
Or maybe
it’s the beginning of something else.
Because the space you left…
It didn’t stay empty forever.
At first,
it ached,
a hollow place
where memories echoed too loudly.
But slowly,
without asking for permission,
I took it back.
Piece by piece,
breath by breath,
I reclaimed the parts of me
that only knew how to belong to you.
And now,
That space is gone.
Not hidden.
Not waiting.
Gone.
You no longer live in my mind
like a conqueror.
You no longer hold
the title of my forever.
You became
a chapter I survived,
not the story I remained in.
I still remember you,
but you no longer define me.
Because losing you
did not end me.
It changed me.
And in that change,
I found something unexpected,
a version of myself
that no longer needs
someone else
to feel whole.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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