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 ...
Beneath the quiet surface
of a wounded soul,
lie shipwrecks
no one was meant to see.
The world knows the smile.
The practiced nod.
The calm voice
that never trembles.
But it does not know
the darkness sleeping underneath.
It does not know
how many nights
were spent gathering broken pieces
from the floor of despair.
How many times
hope was buried
and resurrected
before the dawn arrived.
There is a graveyard there.
A place where trust lies buried.
Where old dreams
rest beneath nameless stones.
Where the ghosts of betrayals
still wander the corridors
of memory.
Yet I walk among them
without fear.
For I have become familiar
with my shadows.
Pain was once a visitor.
Now it is an old acquaintance.
The wound never truly vanished.
It simply learned
how to wear silence.
And silence
is a dangerous thing.
For rivers run deepest
where the surface appears calm.
Volcanoes sleep peacefully
before they awaken.
And wounded souls
often carry storms
behind gentle eyes.
The darkness within me
is not born from hatred.
It is born from surviving.
From standing alone
when no one stayed.
From learning to breathe
when grief wrapped its fingers
around my throat.
From watching innocence
bleed slowly
into wisdom.
So when you look at me,
do not be deceived
by the stillness.
Do not mistake composure
for an absence of scars.
For beneath this quiet surface
lives a thousand untold battles,
a thousand silent screams,
and a soul
that was shattered so completely
it learned how to forge itself
into something stronger
than the hands
that tried to break it.
And perhaps that is the darkest truth of all:
The deepest wounds
do not destroy a soul.
They transform it.
Into something quieter.
Something heavier.
Something that carries both
the darkness
and the strength
to survive it.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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