entry twenty — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
At first glance, it looks like the night sky. Stars caught in dark water, light splintered and scattered across a depth that won’t quite give itself away. But it isn’t the sky.
It’s dead things in the night, drifting on reflections. What’s beneath them still visible in places, obscured in others, the creek bed watching quietly through the murk.
This is what avoidance looks like.
We tell ourselves we are being practical. Responsible. Efficient. We say we can’t afford to stay. That we don’t have the time. That the weight would crush us if we lingered too long in the place where everything ended.
Sometimes those things are true. But truth has layers, and there is always another one underneath the one we say out loud.
I didn’t leave because I couldn’t manage it. I left because staying would have required me to face the finality of it all… and I wasn’t ready to let it be final unless I controlled the ending.
So I doubled down.
If this was the last chapter, I would slam the book shut myself. Sell the house. Let it go. Never look back. Shut myself away from it in the fullest, most tangible way that I could. And I did.
Except that isn’t how grief works. Not in real life. Not in spirit. Not in the psyche or the heart.
What we try to bury doesn’t disappear. What we try to drown learns how to breathe underwater. The things we refuse to look at don’t stop existing. They just wait.
They become shapes beneath the surface. Creek monsters tucked under rocks. Ghouls that don’t announce themselves, only shift when the light hits the water just right.
Running feels like relief at first. It masquerades as strength. As forward motion. As survival.
But it isn’t courage. It isn’t healing. And it certainly isn’t wisdom. It is postponement.
Eventually, the piper comes.
This winter has been that reckoning for me. A season of stillness I didn’t choose, where the water stopped moving long enough for everything to rise.
Regret. Guilt. Shame. The ache of what I didn’t tend to when I still had the chance.
It has been heavy.
But I am here. And I am mid-process of the exhumation.
Instead of running, I am learning (again) to release. To let what I tried to sink float to the surface. To watch it drift, or linger, or soften and break apart with time. To observe rather than flee. To witness rather than erase.
Because drowning it never made it disappear.
It only darkened the water.
There is grace even here. Fractured, scattered, refracted through loss, but still light. Still honest. Still mine, in memory and in soul.
I sold my childhood home, and I regret it. Not because it is gone, but because I believed distance could undo what shaped me. It couldn’t. I didn’t forget it. I didn’t erase it. And now I face the ghost of it… even if I must do so from far, far away.
catacosmosis // 2026
catacosmosis 