Experience,
the one thing words can never fully hold.
It travels with light, slips through the eyes,
and reaches the heart faster
than any voice could ever hope to.
Advice names a single tree,
but experience unveils the whole forest
the shadows, the roots,
the creatures hiding between the leaves.
It arrives as love,
as fear,
as death,
as joy,
as pain
shaping us with hands
both gentle and merciless.
It can break.
It can mend.
It can teach.
It can enslave.
And still
we cannot control when it comes,
only the story it leaves us with
when it's gone.
We never understand
why people tried to shield us
with their warnings.
Not until the imprint settles
a lens we can never take off,
fixed too late.
I've tried to listen,
collecting wisdom
like precious stones,
hoping advice itself
might make me grow.
But compared to a baby
with its first breath of experience
I am still in the womb.
Before it reaches you,
every story about it
feels like fiction
something imagined,
something painted in the mind.
But after it leaves,
you remember the air,
the dark, heavy clouds,
the taste of dust in your mouth.
Those stories become memories
because you have lived
the truth inside them.
Experience kills the one it finds,
and leaves someone different behind.
It becomes a plague you avoid;
even its shadow
can raise your skin in warning.
And you grow more tender
toward others
toward those you try to guide
because you know
what eyes like theirs
should never have to see.
Experience comes
with every decision
a wind too wild to command.
Sail or drown,
The wheel remains yours to steer.