Lope's Thoughts

Just when I set my eyes on you, the sky Forgot its blue and learned another shade; The moon came loose and wandered through the night, As if it had mistaken you for day. The stars fell slowly, one by one, like rain, And landed trembling somewhere in my chest; The clocks grew wings and fled across the plain, While every breath forgot what came up next. The trees began to whisper through their leaves, Speaking in a language only silence knew; A river lifted itself above the reeds, And carried broken pieces of the moon. I saw a thousand sleeping oceans rise, Their silver waves unfolding in your eyes; Old constellations opened like wounds, And unfamiliar heavens changed their skies. The earth beneath my feet became a dream, Its roads dissolved into a drifting stream; I reached for you, but distance turned to smoke, And something in my sleeping heartbeat woke. Your shadow crossed the sunlight on the wall, Yet somehow it was taller than the night; I watched my lonely yesterday dissolve, As t...

Look at yourself. Not the face the mirror has been rehearsing for years, but the one hiding under your skin. Look closely. There is a small door behind your left eye. You have never opened it. Inside, an old version of you is sitting at a table made from yesterday, turning pages with hands that have forgotten their own shape. Open the pages. Do not ask who wrote them. Some words were written by storms. Some by strangers. Some by nights that refused to become mornings. And some, some were written by you while you were asleep. Turn the page. A black sun is hanging from the ceiling. It has no heat, only memories. Underneath it, your forgotten dreams are growing teeth. They are waiting for you to remember their names. Turn another page. There is a road running through your childhood. It has no beginning. It has no end. Only footprints. You follow them until they suddenly become yours. Then you realize you have been walking backward your entire life. Look at yourself. The book is breathing ...

Some smiles are strange little planets floating where a face should be, with tiny moons orbiting their edges and oceans nobody can see. You look at them and think... sunlight. But sometimes there is an entire winter sleeping behind those teeth. Some smiles carry houses with no doors. Inside them, old memories sit at the kitchen table, drinking cups of silence that were never meant to be served. Some carry forests growing upside down inside the chest, their roots tangled around forgotten names, their branches reaching through the ribs toward a sky that does not exist. And some smiles, God, some smiles, carry oceans. Deep black oceans where yesterday's tears have turned into silver fish swimming around the wreckage of things that once mattered. Nobody sees them. Nobody sees the little ships sinking behind someone's eyes. Nobody hears the bells ringing underwater. Nobody knows that a person can walk through a crowded room while carrying an entire abandoned city inside their heart....

Down where the crooked hills descend, beneath a moon that will not bend, there lies a cave with teeth of stone, that opens only when alone. No path is marked upon the ground, yet somehow every road is found. The grass lies flat before its mouth, as though something crawled straight out. They say the cave was once a mine. They are lying. There are no tools inside. No lanterns. No bones. Only footprints. Thousands of them. All facing inward. I heard the cave call out my name, but not in a human voice. It sounded like my mother speaking from underwater. Then my own voice answered from the dark. “Come closer.” I stepped inside. The entrance vanished behind me. Not closed. Vanished. The walls were breathing. Slowly. Deeply. Each breath pulled the air from my lungs, and when the cave exhaled, I heard whispers crawling through the cracks. My name. My name. My name. Then something whispered a name I had never heard before. And the walls went silent. I walked deeper. The cave grew warmer. Then ...

You thought of me until it hurt, or so the night tells me when it leans against my window with your voice in its teeth. You thought of me in the quiet hours, when the clocks forgot how to move and every shadow in your room wore my shape. You remembered my name like a wound remembers the knife. But you forgot how you pushed me away. Funny, isn't it? How memory becomes selective when the heart is trying to sleep peacefully beside its own cruelty. You remember my hands. The way they reached for you when the world became too cold. You remember my laughter, the little warmth I left behind in the corners of your life. You remember the way I looked at you as though you were something worth staying for. But you don't remember how you became ruthless. How your words slowly grew teeth. How every conversation became a hallway with no exit. How you learned exactly where I was soft and pressed there until I stopped bleeding where you could see it. You don't remember the doors you slamme...

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 was born between two worlds. On one side, the houses wore gold around their windows. On the other, the windows wore cardboard around their houses. Between them ran a road so ordinary that nobody noticed it was a river. I walked that river barefoot. On my left, men drank sunlight from crystal glasses. On my right, children drank water from plastic bottles that had already lived someone else's life. And above both worlds, God was silent. Not absent. Silent. The kind of silence that makes you wonder whether heaven is listening or simply watching the way the moon watches a city burn its lights. I used to think wealth lived closer to God. Then I saw a poor woman break her only loaf of bread into three pieces, one for her child, one for a stranger, one for tomorrow. She did not know tomorrow was coming empty-handed. Still, she saved it a piece. That night I understood something I had never learned from the rich. Sometimes faith is not having enough and sharing anyw...