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 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,
to hold it like a shadow
that teaches you about love.
For even wounds are living things,
They change the ones they scar.
They shape the way you understand
How fragile humans are.
And slowly, in the hurting,
There is something you become,
not untouched, not unshaken,
but still able to go on.
So let it unfold within you,
this ache that makes you real;
for you are not what breaks you,
You are what learns to feel.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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