Looking down at those leaves, loosened from their season, clinging by the thinnest threads of stem… I see myself. They hover over moving water, suspended between staying and letting go, their edges softened and pulled apart by the trembling creek. The surface never stills long enough for clarity; it stretches every familiar thing into wavering uncertainty.
Since watching my teenage son slip backward, words he’d owned suddenly foreign in his mouth, routines he’d mastered dissolving overnight, and since the autism label arrived with its chorus of “you should have pushed harder, earlier, medicated sooner,” this is where I live:
Perched on a fragile edge, tangled in reflections I can’t seize, balancing on a stem that thins a little each day. I haven’t fallen, but I feel the current waiting to carry me off, a motion I never chose and can never control.
I have experienced sickness, the trauma of caregiving, the many horrors of diseases I pray not one of you ever meet in your life, death and loss and funerals… the last decade of my life has been a nightmare with beautiful trimmings. But of all the moments of utter lost-ness and grief during those experiences (a description which puts it lightly, in fact), this is the most difficult and complicated and heart-wrenching thing I have ever experienced in my life. Not my son, but battling a system far worse than the one I last met two years ago, with his Godfather. Pediatric medicine in the US in 2026.
His therapists and specialists tell me love wasn’t enough and never will be. I still think it was the only thing that kept us both from drowning.
I’m not sure what this blog, or other art sharing platforms, will look like for me in 2026 (let’s be real – when have I ever?), That’s why I have yet to write the yearly “first post.” So, tonight I begin the year with this, with the truth and with reality:
I don’t know what lies ahead, but I do know who is driving. I thank God daily it’s not me, but Him.
xo,
c.
catacosmosis 
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