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...
Yesterday did not end.
It merely changed its clothes.
At midnight
it crawled out from beneath my bed
wearing the face
of something I had buried alive.
It followed me into morning.
I could hear it
dragging its darkness
behind me,
a wet, invisible thing
with no name
and too many hands.
The sun rose
like a wounded god.
Still,
the dark remained.
It had learned
the shape of my shadow.
Everywhere I went,
it arrived first.
At the bus stop,
it sat inside the empty seat
beside me.
At the café,
it stirred my coffee
with the finger
of someone I no longer remember.
At work,
it whispered beneath the fluorescent lights,
You have been here before.
I had.
I have been everywhere
I am afraid to return to.
The past is a country
without borders.
You can leave the house.
You can change your name.
You can move cities.
You can bury photographs
beneath the floorboards.
But memory has no geography.
It follows.
It follows.
It follows.
Sometimes I wake
with the taste of yesterday
inside my mouth.
Ash.
Rust.
Rainwater.
A little blood.
I look in the mirror
and there is someone
standing behind my eyes.
Someone older.
Someone quieter.
Someone who has memorized
every way I learned
to pretend I was fine.
I ask him,
“Are you still there?”
He smiles.
Not kindly.
Not cruelly.
Like a grave
that has finally recognized
the person standing above it.
Then the mirror begins to breathe.
The glass fogs.
A hand appears
from the other side.
My hand.
But thinner.
Older.
Covered in soil.
It presses against the glass
as if yesterday
is trying to come back
through me.
I step away.
The room grows longer.
The hallway stretches
into a black river.
Doors multiply
along the walls.
Behind one door
I hear laughter.
Behind another,
someone crying.
Behind another,
my own voice
saying things
I swore I never said.
I do not open them.
I already know
what lives there.
Regret.
It has been feeding
on my silence for years.
At night
it grows antlers.
It walks through my dreams
like a deer
that has learned
how to hunt.
I run through forests
made of old photographs.
Faces hang from branches.
Eyes grow in the bark.
The moon is nailed
to the sky
like a dead insect.
I keep running.
But every path
leads back
to the same house.
My childhood.
My grief.
My unfinished sentence.
The door is always open.
Inside,
a younger version of me
sits at the kitchen table.
He does not look up.
He is waiting.
“For what?” I ask.
He says,
“For you.”
His voice is small.
It has been waiting
for years.
I sit across from him.
Between us
is a bowl of black water.
We stare into it.
The water begins showing
everything I tried to forget.
The face I couldn't save.
The hand I let go of.
The night that changed me.
The words that became wounds
after they left my mouth.
The person I was
before I understood
that some doors
only open one way.
The younger me
touches the water.
It bleeds.
He looks at me.
“Why did you leave?”
I have no answer.
Because sometimes
survival looks exactly like abandonment.
Sometimes
the person you save
is yourself,
and you spend the rest
of your life apologizing
to the person you had to leave behind.
The house begins collapsing.
Not downward.
Inward.
The walls fold
into my chest.
The ceiling becomes a sky.
The floor becomes an ocean.
The furniture floats upward
like drowned memories
returning to the surface.
And yesterday,
yesterday stands
in the middle of the room.
It is enormous now.
A cathedral made of grief.
Its ribs are windows.
Its spine is a staircase.
Its mouth is full
of all the words
I swallowed.
It speaks without moving.
You cannot outrun me.
“I know.”
You cannot kill me.
“I know.”
Then why do you keep running?
I look at it.
Because I am tired.
Because I have mistaken
escape for freedom.
Because I thought
if I walked far enough
from the ruins,
the ruins would forget
my name.
But ruins remember.
So do ghosts.
So do oceans.
So do bodies.
I step closer.
The darkness trembles.
For the first time
I see that it is not endless.
It is only deep.
There is a difference.
I reach inside it.
My hand disappears
up to the wrist.
Then the elbow.
Then the shoulder.
I feel around
for something,
a heart,
a wound,
a door,
anything.
I find a child.
He is curled inside the dark
like a question
God forgot to answer.
I pull him out.
He is shaking.
He looks at me.
He asks,
“Are we going home?”
I don't know where home is anymore.
So I say,
“Come with me.”
We walk.
Not away from yesterday.
Through it.
Past the rooms.
Past the voices.
Past the versions of myself
I abandoned
to become who I am.
We walk beneath
the dead moon.
We walk through forests
of memory.
We walk until the darkness
stops following.
Not because it vanished.
Because it no longer
needed to chase me.
It was inside me.
It always had been.
By dawn,
I am standing
on the edge of the world.
The sun is rising
through the ruins.
It does not look beautiful.
It looks violent.
A red wound
opening across the horizon.
Birds emerge from it
like pieces of torn scripture.
The child beside me
takes my hand.
I look behind us.
Yesterday is still there.
Black.
Breathing.
Impossible to erase.
But smaller now.
Not a god.
Not a monster.
Only a shadow
cast by something
that happened
when I was not ready
to understand it.
I turn toward the morning.
The darkness comes with me.
Of course it does.
Some ghosts
are not meant to be exorcised.
Some are meant
to become part
of the architecture.
So I carry yesterday
like a second skeleton.
I carry every dead version
of myself
beneath the living one.
I carry the rooms
I cannot enter.
The names
I cannot say.
The love
that became absence.
The absence
that became memory.
The memory
that became me.
And still,
I walk.
Not because
the darkness has ended.
Not because
the past has forgiven me.
Not because
tomorrow promises mercy.
I walk because
even a haunted body
can move toward morning.
I walk because
somewhere beneath
all this blackness,
something is still breathing.
Something small.
Something stubborn.
Something that yesterday
could not kill.
And perhaps
that is what I am now,
not the person
who escaped the dark,
but the person
who learned its language,
looked it in the mouth,
and whispered:
You may follow me,
but you will never
decide where I go.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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