Lope's Thoughts

Why, but why don’t you feel her pain? Do you think she chose the tears, the sleepless nights, the quiet rain? Why, but why do you look away when her smile is only hiding what she cannot say? Do you think it’s easy to carry all that weight, to laugh as nothing happened while breaking at the gates? Why, but why when she whispers, “I’m fine,” do you believe the words and never read between the lines? She doesn’t need your pity. She doesn’t need your shame. She only wants somebody to understand her pain. She doesn’t need your judgment, she doesn’t need your hate, she doesn’t need your evil words adding to the weight. She doesn’t need your whispers, your cruelty, or your blame, she’s already fighting battles you will never know by name. Do you think it’s easy to be strong every day, to hold a heart together while watching it decay? Why, but why can’t you see her scars? Some wounds don’t bleed, some battles leave no marks. And maybe one day you’ll finally understand, that she wasn’t asking f...

 I will love you like that, like the pillow that remembers the shape of your head after you have left. Like the bedroom door that opens a little wider when it hears your footsteps. Like the little blue fish sleeping inside a teacup you have never touched, quietly turning in circles as though it knows how many times I have missed you. I will love you without asking why your shadow sometimes stays beside me after you have gone. It stands near the bed. It does not speak. It only watches the door. When you are tired, I will lie beside you and listen to your breathing. Sometimes, between one breath and the next, I will hear another. I will not tell you. I will simply move closer until there is no space for anything else. I will love you like a key that has been warm from another person's hand for a hundred years. Like a photograph that changes slightly whenever you kiss me. If your heart becomes a strange house, I will enter carefully. I will learn which floorboards remember your childh...

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 ...

Sometimes I wonder if the trees are only standing because they are too polite to fall into the sky. I look at them and something inside me becomes quiet. Not peaceful. Quiet in the way an old house becomes quiet when everyone who lived there has finally gone. The wind moves through the branches like someone searching for a name they once loved. I wonder if it finds it. I wonder if the leaves are letters God never finished writing. Every autumn He tears them out and lets them fall across the earth. Every spring He begins again. Perhaps that is why the trees never complain about losing themselves. They know how to become empty without becoming nothing. I sit beneath one and listen. The roots are whispering under the soil. I cannot understand them, but somehow I know they are talking about me. Maybe they remember my ancestors. Maybe they remember the first human who looked at the sky and asked, Why? Maybe the roots have been carrying that question for thousands of years. The river has no ...

I did not fall for you like people fall in movies. There was no thunder, no sudden music, no heaven opening its hands. You simply stayed a little longer than you should have. And somehow, that was enough. You learned the quiet parts of me, the places I keep locked, the old wounds I cover with ordinary conversation. You never asked me to explain the darkness. You sat beside it. That frightened me. Because I had spent so long believing love meant being saved, I did not know what to do with someone who could look at my brokenness and call it beautiful. Sometimes I wonder if we found each other too late. You carrying your ghosts, me carrying mine, two wounded souls pretending we were not recognizing each other. Our love was never soft. It had teeth. It lived in midnight conversations, in jealous silences, in the ache of almost losing one another. You could hurt me without raising your voice. I could break your heart with nothing more than the distance in my eyes. And still, when the night ...

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...