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 are tears
that never fall in public.
Tears that sit behind the eyes
like prisoners too proud to beg for freedom.
Heavy tears.
Rich with exhaustion.
The kind that make the chest ache
before the eyes even burn.
You see them smiling,
laughing loudly at dinner tables,
posting beautiful moments,
wearing confidence like perfume,
but grief is clever.
It knows how to dress well.
Some people cry
without making a sound.
You can hear it
in the pause before they answer,
in the way they stare too long out windows,
in the tired “I’m okay”
that collapses halfway through the sentence.
Oh no,
not them too, you think.
Not the ones who seem untouched by life.
But pain does not care
who has marble floors
or whose name opens doors.
Sometimes the heaviest hearts
belong to people
who were taught never to break.
So they swallow everything.
The pressure.
The loneliness.
The expectation to always shine.
And those hidden tears,
God, they speak.
They speak through sleepless nights.
Through clenched jaws.
Through sudden silence in crowded rooms.
Through the way a person can have everything
except rest.
There is something terrifying
about a human being
who keeps carrying sadness
without ever putting it down.
Eventually it leaks.
In anger.
In distance.
In numbness.
In staring at ceilings at 3 a.m.
wondering why life still feels so unbearably heavy.
Some tears never touch the face
because they drown the soul first.
And maybe that is the saddest thing of all,
how a person can be surrounded by beauty,
luxury, applause, people,
yet secretly whisper to themselves,
“I am so tired.”
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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