AWW inspired

AWW—Alan Wilson Watts

The Grain That Became

Why is it the ones who feel the most were handed the most fire,
Who came into this world already carrying the weight?
The sensitive soul is not an accident of strange desire,
The oyster does not choose its wound, but something learns to wait.
I was born into a house where love wore a condition’s face,
Where kindness had a price tag and affection had a clause.
I spent my childhood studying the silences and space,
Learning how to read a room the way a lawyer reads the laws.
And what I thought was damage, what I named my broken thing,
Was actually the friction that the ordinary lack.
The undisturbed do not awaken — comfort does not bring
The kind of sight that only comes from not being able to look back.
A grain of sand slips into the soft body of a shell,
It cannot be removed, it cannot be explained away.
The oyster does not mourn the grain or curse the place it fell,
It simply starts the slow and layered work of making something stay.
That is what the wounded learn that the comfortable never do,
That you cannot solve the darkness by demanding that it leave.
You coat it slow in understanding, layer after layer through,
Until the thing that nearly broke you is the thing you most believe.
My family was the sand grain and their chaos was the grit,
Their confusion planted questions that the easy never ask.
What is love when love comes broken, when it does not seem to fit,
When the people meant to show you wear affection like a mask?
You cannot simply copy what you watched, you cannot trust
The inheritance of pattern when the pattern is a wound.
Something in you pushes back and says this simply is not just,
And in that refusal, in that no, a new direction is groomed.
Philosophy gave me language for the ache I could not name,
Psychology gave mirrors to the hallways of my youth.
But neither healed the thing itself — what healed me was the claim
That what was done to them, was done to them, and that is also truth.
They were the grain inside an older shell than mine,
Their cruelty was a coating over something that had hurt.
The chain goes back through generations, silence down the line,
And someone has to be the one who lifts it from the dirt.
So I will be the oyster who stops passing on the sand,
Who coats the wound in something worth the carrying and the cost.
I will be the one who names the grief and opens up the hand,
And finds that what I feared I’d lost was never really lost.
The pearl is not the absence of the grain, the pearl is what remains
When something living meets its wound and does not look away.
The hardest soil produces the most luminous of gains,