When your gaze found mine, the whole world swayed, As if the earth had missed a hidden beat; The sunlight suddenly grew unafraid, Then melted like warm gold around my feet. I tried to look away, but something stayed, A trembling little universe in you; My eyes became two doors I could not close, And every secret seemed to wander through. I felt my cheeks turn roses in the rain, A sudden fire underneath my skin; The stars began to whisper my sweet shame, While little suns kept blooming from within. Your eyes were not just eyes, they were a place, A strange blue room where gravity was gone; I wandered through the silence of your gaze And somehow lost the person I was on. My heartbeat stumbled, then forgot its name, It ran barefoot through corridors of light; I blushed as though the moon had called me beautiful, Then hid my face from heaven's watching sight. The trees leaned closer, jealous of the view, The flowers opened wider just to see; Even the wind became unusually shy, As thoug...
He loved her once, perhaps,
or called possession by that name,
and built a kingdom out of silence,
where tenderness was punished
and fear wore a wedding ring.
Her home became a house of shadows,
its walls learning the language of her cries.
She became fluent in footsteps,
in the sudden closing of doors,
in the weather of his temper.
She carried bruises beneath her sleeves
like forbidden constellations,
each one a map
of where she had been broken
and where she had survived.
He told her she was nothing
without the man who diminished her.
So she began to make herself smaller,
a whisper in the hallway,
a breath beneath the floorboards,
a woman slowly disappearing
inside her own skin.
But even ashes remember fire.
Somewhere beneath the years of fear,
a small and stubborn light remained.
It whispered through the darkness:
You were not born
to be someone's battlefield.
So one night,
while the moon kept its distance
and the house slept beneath its secrets,
she gathered the remnants of herself,
a trembling hand,
a borrowed coat,
a heart full of fractures,
and the last surviving piece of hope.
Then she opened the door.
No thunder announced her freedom.
No angels descended from heaven.
There was only the quiet sound
of her footsteps leaving
the life that had been killing her.
Behind her,
he remained with the walls
and the echo of his own cruelty.
Ahead of her,
the road was cold, uncertain, endless.
But it was hers.
And for the first time,
she walked without asking permission
to breathe.
She did not leave because she was weak.
She left
because somewhere inside the woman
he had spent years trying to destroy,
there was still a soul
he could not conquer.
And that soul
finally chose itself.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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