heartbreak
They can break your heart, but they can't break your soul; poetry about lost love that comforts and uplifts.
Dust-Killed Melodies
There are melodies in every life that never make it to the chorus. Some die quietly, their notes thinning out the way old memories do—soft, almost apologetic. Others die louder, like a slammed door or a breath someone never takes again. And then there are melodies like the ones I lost, not to tragedy, not to time, but to the simple, cruel settling of dust. Songs that were meant to bloom but instead suffocated under the weight of everything unspoken. I learned this the day I found my childhood music box. It had been tucked on the highest shelf of my mother’s old cabinet, the one she kept locked for years, the one she said contained “things better left untouched.” When the house grew quiet after she left—gone not by death but by the kind of distance that takes root between people who forget how to speak to each other—I climbed a chair and opened that cabinet for the first time. A soft gray film covered everything: letters, photographs, half-finished crafts, little worlds she once cared about. And in the middle of it all sat the music box—rose-gold edges worn, the ballerina inside frozen mid-twirl. When I wound it, nothing happened. The melody that used to follow me into sleep had died somewhere in the dark. Dust-killed. Forgotten. Standing there, I realized something I had ignored for years: it wasn’t just the music box. It was us. We had let our own melody die the same slow, neglected way. When I was young, she sang while she cooked—small things, humming while stirring lentils, tapping rhythm on plates, picking up lyrics like drifting feathers. By the time I turned sixteen, her songs had already quieted, swallowed by exhaustion, arguments, unspoken apologies, and the grief she carried in silence. The house grew lonelier in ways I couldn’t name back then, quieter in ways I didn’t know could hurt. The melodies we lose aren’t always the tragic ones. Sometimes they’re the ones we didn’t even notice were fading. Sometimes they’re the ones we let dust settle over while telling ourselves there will be time to bring them back. As I held the music box that day, I felt the weight of our unsung years—of the times I should’ve asked if she was okay, of the moments when she should’ve said she missed me, of the silence that expanded until it sounded like wind inside an empty room. Dust doesn’t ask permission to settle. It simply arrives, slowly, invisibly, until one day it reminds you how long you’ve been looking away. I think about that now whenever I catch myself saving something for later: a call I postpone, a message I ignore, forgiveness I delay, a dream I shelf because I believe it’ll still be waiting for me. Melodies don’t wait. They vanish in increments. What dies from dust rarely returns the same. I eventually repaired the music box. A tiny metal gear had stiffened, exhausted from years of inactivity. When it finally played again, the melody was slower, more fragile, more human—like a memory sung through a tired throat. I didn’t try to resurrect what my mother and I lost. Some melodies aren’t meant to be replayed. But I did learn how to protect the ones still alive: the people who speak softly, the dreams that whisper, the hope that tries one more time. The music box sits on my desk now, a reminder that silence is not neutral—it is erosion. And that anything beautiful, left unattended, will eventually choke under the weight of dust-killed melodies.
By LUNA EDITH10 months ago in Poets
What the Moon Told My Brokenness
There was a night when I could no longer hold the weight of my own silence. It was the kind of stillness that presses against your chest, where even breathing feels like confession. I sat by my window, the world outside washed in silver, and the moon hung there — round, distant, and unbothered by all the things that had unraveled inside me. For a long time, I said nothing. And for a long time, the moon simply listened. I told her I was tired. Tired of being brave. Tired of pretending the ache in my chest was poetry instead of exhaustion. Tired of telling people I was fine when fine had become a fragile disguise. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t turn away. The light just lingered, soft and unjudging, like the gentlest kind of understanding. “I don’t know how to be whole again,” I whispered. And in the silence that followed, I swear she leaned closer. She said — not in words, but in a quiet knowing — You don’t have to be. I looked up, startled by how much truth could fit in a sentence without sound. The moon told me that broken things are not failures — they are simply stories that have learned to breathe differently. She said that even her own face is marked with craters, that she too carries the scars of her making. And still, every night, the world looks up and calls her beautiful. That night I realized: maybe healing isn’t about returning to what I was. Maybe it’s about learning to live softly inside what remains. The moon told me that pain doesn’t always ask to be solved — sometimes it just asks to be seen. She said that when the ocean pulls at her, she does not fight back; she simply rises and falls. There is a rhythm to surrender that the heart must learn, a way of trusting the tide even when it feels like drowning. I asked her how she could be so steady, so endlessly present while the world below her changed and broke and healed again. She told me, Because I am never truly alone. Even when the sky is dark, the sun still holds me from behind. And I thought about the people who have held me, even when I could not meet their eyes. The ones who stayed, who didn’t ask me to explain my sadness — just sat beside it. The ones who looked at my cracks and didn’t flinch. Maybe that’s what light is — not the absence of shadow, but the courage to exist alongside it. The moon asked me what I would do with all that I’d lost. I didn’t have an answer. So she told me this: Loss is not the end of love. It’s the proof that you’ve been changed by it. And I cried. Not the kind of crying that begs to be fixed, but the kind that quietly thanks the world for still holding you while you fall apart. The moon said she has watched countless people whisper their grief into the dark — and every time, the dawn still comes. Not as a promise that everything will be okay, but as a reminder that even endings can be gentle. When she began to fade behind the clouds, I felt something I hadn’t in a long time — not happiness, not even hope, but peace. A soft exhale. A small mercy. Before she disappeared completely, she left me with one last thought: You were never meant to shine without your shadows. And that night, for the first time in months, I slept — not because I was healed, but because I no longer needed to be.
By Jhon smith10 months ago in Poets
