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 was once a heart
that did not begin cruel.
It once carried softness,
once understood love, and
once trembled at the sight of pain.
But darkness is patient.
It does not destroy everything at once.
It whispers first.
Quiet lies slipped gently into wounds.
Bitterness planted like seeds.
Anger fed slowly over time
until kindness began starving inside.
The heart changed quietly.
Smiles became masks.
Compassion became weakness.
Trust became something to exploit.
And the soul slowly learned,
how to feel powerful,
through the suffering of others.
Evil rarely arrives
wearing horns or flames.
Sometimes it hides
inside wounded pride,
inside greed,
Inside, jealousy left untreated,
inside pain that refused to heal
and instead learned how to spread itself.
The devilish heart grew colder with time.
It laughed at innocence.
Fed on control.
Turned love into manipulation
and truth into poison.
Even silence became dangerous around it.
Yet beneath all the darkness,
buried somewhere deep,
was the fragile memory
of who that heart once was.
Because no soul is born monstrous.
Some are simply consumed slowly
by shadows they chose to entertain
until the shadows finally felt like home.
And perhaps that is the tragedy of evil.
Not that darkness exists,
But sometimes people
Invite it in so often
They forget they were ever meant
to live in the light.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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