Sand

You only see a fraction of who I am,
too much sand in your eyes,
too many lies poured into you
until you learned to call them truth.

You cannot see the shape of your own face
when you are trapped behind it.

So I pace back and forth,
wishing you could see me
without translating me
through everything
you were taught to believe.

I cry because I want to tear the lie open,
pull every false thread loose,
and weave the truth
back into the fabric of my youth.

I want to braid it
with everything I survived—
every scar,
every mistake,
every piece of myself
I was taught to hide.

I want to stand inside the wreckage and say:

Look.

This is what remained.
This is what became stronger.
This is what refused to disappear.

We have all cried.
We have all buried pieces of ourselves.
We have all wounded ourselves
trying to become acceptable
to people who were bleeding too.

We mistake pain for punishment,
shame for truth,
silence for peace.

The sand keeps falling
into our eyes,
into our mouths,
into every mirror,
until the disguise becomes so familiar
we forget there was ever
a face beneath it.

We look through scratched glass
and swear what we see is real.

But maybe our vision
is only the shape
of everything that hurt us.

Maybe every scar became a lens.
Maybe every betrayal left a color behind.
Maybe the world isn’t what we see—

maybe we see
what happened to us.

And the pain inside,
the thing someone called ugly,
broken,
wrong,
sin—

maybe it is not proof
that something is wrong with us.

Maybe it is evidence.

A burden, yes,
but also a doorway.

Because what is truth
beneath all that pride?

What are we
when we strip away
the pigment,
the masks,
the stories,
the beautiful lies
we tell ourselves to survive?

Maybe truth
is not something we find.

Maybe it is what remains
when there is finally
nothing left to hide behind.

And maybe the hardest thing
we will ever have to see

is ourselves—

without the sand.