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 ...
One mask,
yet countless faces beneath its skin,
each one learning how to begin
again
without ever truly starting.
It smiles in borrowed sunlight,
it bows in practiced grace,
it learns the art of vanishing
while standing in one place.
A thousand eyes may pass it,
a thousand hearts may guess,
Yet none will see the fracture
beneath its perfect dress.
It speaks in many voices,
each softer than the last,
rewriting every present
to survive what once was past.
In morning light, it is gentle,
by night it learns to hide,
Becoming what is needed
on whichever shifting tide.
And still, within the silence,
where no applause remains,
The mask begins remembering
the weight of unnamed pains.
For every face it borrowed
was never fully free,
each one a fleeting version
of what it feared to be.
So it gathers all its fragments,
all its selves in quiet trance,
and wonders if it’s living
or only learned to dance.
Yet somewhere in the breaking,
a truth begins to start:
One mask cannot erase
the multitude of hearts.
For even when divided,
even when disguised,
There is only one soul breathing
behind a hundred lives.
And maybe, just maybe...
The faces aren’t a curse,
but echoes of a being
trying to become its universe.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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