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 ...
In the house where the wallpaper peels like old confessions, laughter survives first. Not in the kitchen where the clocks hold their breath, nor in the doorway where apologies rot in the frame, but in dark corners. There, beneath the stairs, behind coats smelling of rain and cigarettes, someone once laughed so hard the dust woke up dancing. The sound stayed. Even now, midnight gathers itself in the sharp mouths of rooms, and grief walks carefully, counting its silverware, checking the locks twice. Still... from the corner near the furnace, a crooked little laugh escapes, warm as contraband. It knows things. It knows sorrow is heavy but never balanced. Knows fear hates being mocked. Knows shadows loosen when somebody grins inside them. So the laughter waits there, knees tucked to its chest, bright-eyed as a stray cat, refusing extinction. And sometimes, when the whole house aches with silence, it rises, small at first, a cracked teacup sound, a thief of funerals, until even the dar...