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...
There are questions
that do not want an answer.
They live beneath the tongue,
quiet as buried rain,
waiting for the hour
when the heart becomes still enough
to hear them breathing.
I have carried one for years.
I do not know its name.
I only know that sometimes,
when the world has gone to sleep
and the moon hangs pale
over the roofs of strangers,
something in me remembers
a place I have never been.
A corridor without windows.
A door without a room.
A voice without a face
calling me by a name
I have never told anyone.
I used to believe
mystery belonged to darkness.
I was wrong.
Mystery is the light
that enters a room
and reveals what we were not ready to see.
It is the pause
between a question and its answer.
The hand that almost touches yours
on a crowded train.
The letter never sent.
The photograph of a childhood
you cannot remember.
The sudden ache
for someone you have never met.
Perhaps that is why
we fear the unknown,
not because it is empty,
but because it may be full
of things we have forgotten.
There are memories
that do not belong to yesterday.
There are dreams
that feel more ancient than sleep.
There are moments
when the soul seems to recognize
a road the body has never walked.
And what do we call that?
Coincidence?
Imagination?
Longing?
We give strange things ordinary names
because ordinary names
make the world easier to survive.
But still,
the mystery remains.
It waits in the old house
after everyone has left.
It waits in the ocean
where the blue becomes black.
It waits in the eyes
of the person who looks at you
as though they have known you
before this life began.
And perhaps the deepest mystery
is not what exists beyond us,
but what exists within us
that we have never dared to meet.
Because there is a wilderness
inside every human being...
a country without maps,
where grief grows wild,
where forgotten hopes
lie beneath the soil,
where every unanswered question
becomes a star.
I have wandered there.
I have lost pieces of myself
in that darkness.
And strangely,
I have found pieces there too.
So now I no longer ask
the mystery to explain itself.
I sit beside it.
I listen.
I let it remain unfinished.
For some truths
are not doors to be opened.
Some truths are oceans,
and we are only meant
to stand at the shore,
listening to the waves
speak in a language
older than our names.
Perhaps one day
I will understand.
Perhaps I will not.
Perhaps the answer
has been walking beside me
all this time,
wearing my face,
breathing my breath,
waiting patiently
for me to stop searching
outside myself.
And when I finally turn around,
perhaps there will be nothing there,
only silence,
only the trembling light
of morning,
and the terrible, beautiful realization
that the mystery
was never hiding from me.
It was becoming me.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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