Love was never a heartbeat. It was the echo left behind after the heart forgot why it was still beating. It arrived wearing another person's face, its hands stitched together from promises that had already begun to rot. I welcomed it. Not because it was kind, but because loneliness knows how to mistake a wolf for warmth. Every smile it offered cast a longer shadow. Every whispered "forever" fed another ghost sleeping beneath my ribs. The thought of love is a clever liar. It builds cathedrals from broken mirrors, then asks us to kneel before our own reflections, calling the illusion destiny. How eagerly we obey. We water flowers that grow from graves, write poems to people who never truly existed, and embrace memories still unborn. Love watches. Silent. Patient. Like a spider waiting in the center of a web woven from hope. It never forces us inside. It simply lets us believe the silver threads are rays of morning light. By the time we understand, the sky has forgotten our ...
He once gave her a smile, not just any smile, but the kind that softened the edges of the world, the kind that slipped quietly into her guarded heart and rearranged the furniture of her trust. It was gentle. Too gentle. It felt like safety, like warm light slipping through a cracked window into a room that had forgotten the sun. She held onto it. Carefully. Like something fragile, like something she had prayed for without knowing she had been praying. But some things arrive as gifts only to reveal themselves as hunger. The change did not come loudly. No thunder warned her. No sky split open in caution. It came in fragments, in pauses that lasted too long, in eyes that no longer matched the curve of his mouth, In words that carried weight where there once was none. His smile learned cruelty before she learned to fear it. It sharpened slowly, like a blade being honed in the dark, quiet, patient, waiting for the moment She would no longer recognize its edge. And when it cut, It did not bl...