Lope's Thoughts

Before you call her difficult, wear her shoes. Not the shoes she wears now, not the polished ones, not the ones she learned to walk in after life had already taught her how to hide the limp. Wear the old ones. The ones worn thin by nights she never talks about. Step into the life she keeps behind her smile. Walk through the morning after a night of crying and pretend your eyes do not hurt. Get dressed. Fix your hair. Answer the phone with a voice that sounds normal. Tell everyone, “I’m okay,” while something inside you is quietly begging to be left alone. Wear her shoes when someone she loved becomes someone she fears. Walk the distance between I trust you and I should have known. Feel how heavy a heart becomes when it has carried forgiveness longer than it should have. You call her cold. You never saw how many times she reached for warmth and came back burned. You call her distant. You never heard the conversations she had with herself at three in the morning, trying to convince her h...

There are places where hatred does not scream. It smiles. It sits across the table, asks how you are, remembers your birthday, and says, I love you with a mouth that has already learned the shape of betrayal. We became very good at pretending. Good clothes. Good photographs. Good stories for people who never stayed long enough to see the cracks. We smiled beside each other while something poisonous quietly grew between us. No one noticed. Why would they? We looked happy. And happiness, these days, is often just a photograph taken at the right angle. You held my hand in public as though you were afraid the world might discover you hated me. I held yours because I was still hoping the person I loved was somewhere inside you. Perhaps that was my mistake. I mistook performance for devotion. You brought me flowers with one hand and planted betrayal with the other. You whispered promises while leaving little knives between the words. I did not see them at first. Love makes poor detectives of...

Take him. He is no longer a wound I am compelled to touch, nor a prayer I am foolish enough to repeat. He is merely the ruin I walked out of with my hands still trembling and my soul learning the shape of its own name. You may have him. Take the mouth that once promised forever and learned the language of betrayal. Take the hands that held me only to teach me how to ache. Take the heart that mistook possession for devotion. Take all of him, the carefully rehearsed apologies, the beautiful lies, the silences sharpened into weapons, the affection that arrived only when I had forgotten how to ask for it. I have no claim on him now. He is yesterday's ash, and I have no desire to rebuild a fire from what already burned me. If he calls himself a treasure, believe him. I once did too. I polished his brokenness with the softness of my own heart, mistaking endurance for love, mistaking survival for a marriage worth saving. But some men are not meant to be rescued by love. Some are simply le...

You thought her glow was something you had given her, a candle you could cup in your hands, shield from the wind, or snuff out when it displeased you. You never understood: some women are born carrying entire dawns inside their ribs. She came to you with constellations beneath her skin, with a tenderness that could have made a sanctuary of your ruins. You called it weakness. You mistook her patience for permission, her silence for surrender, her forgiveness for a chain you could keep pulling. So you began taking pieces of her, a little laughter, a little courage, a little faith in the word love , until even her reflection looked like a stranger asking to be rescued. Yet the light did not die. It went underground. It hid beneath the ashes, quiet as roots beneath winter, waiting for the moment she would remember that darkness had never been her true name. And when she left, she did not steal your fortune, your house, your name, or anything you once believed made you powerful. She took on...

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 hers...

She came into my life like quiet light, not loud, not demanding, just steady, just real. A presence that softened the sharp edges in me, a warmth I did not earn, a grace I did not understand. But I was not built for gratitude then. I saw her kindness as something to use, something to take, something that would always remain no matter how I treated it. I never looked at her with honest eyes. Never stood before her with a clean heart. Every word I gave was half-shadow, every promise carried the weight of deceit. I thought I was clever. I thought I was in control. Greed grew in me like a sickness, slow at first, then consuming. I wanted more than I deserved, more than I needed, more than she could give without breaking. And still… she stayed. That was the cruelest part. She stayed while I twisted something sacred into something hollow. She stayed while I turned her presence from blessing into a burden. Until one day, she didn’t. And the silence she left behind was louder than anything I h...