CASCADES & GOODS

September 13, 2026 | 6:00 P.M.

LITERARY: CREATIVE NON-FICTION CATEGORY

Behind every injustice, every inequality, every falsehood clouding a person, once stood a child. They had stood in a room, warm, cast in hues of sun-once-welcoming, sound deadened by the hush of morning labor and voices echoing about. Excusably inept and inexperienced, you were once a child. This comes to you now as you think of that life that was once yours. In all that swirling, deadened loneliness, you were still curious, benevolent, and watchful of life flowing by through worn and lived-in windows. You could not mingle amongst the adults, for such a world has no capacity for a child, so the least you could do was watch their awkward performance of living. And it is something you will never grow out of, apparently, even as your life began to fill up with daily labor, even as the windows between you and the world ruptured and cascaded into your own solitude, albeit so suddenly. The sun burgeons too hot, and her light is too bright. You will stare at the window of reality with acceptance and sorrow both, ambivalence great in its lumbering shadow. You will be confronted with the asymmetry in its rawest form; the person you are is still who you once were, only that the window is long gone.

And what is life without its jeopardy and squander for balance? Of every need displaced before your eyes and the forever struggle of keeping the blood inwards whilst stretching into molds of leftover, decaying benevolence. The life envisioned by you, before you, is an expanse of questionable phantasms a familiar one has dreamt of, phantasms of a pitiful providence once hinged on, that is constantly undoing before your eyes. There has been no greater comedy than the vehement life before you, this resemblance of a theatre act that is tangible with only your eyes. To you, to the agonist and witness of scorn, will stand over the watered-down life of yours-to-be and puddled life of yours-no-more. But to the infant universe, you are worlds sequestered and folded within her tapestry. You are to be framed to the colors of her portrait, a stroke of luck shriveled down. Life becomes uncontrollable, yet to her sanctorium, it is indiscernible. And do you not see, do you not understand? The picture has long been painted, dried. Your grief, its long accumulation of existences, has been infinitesimal to her decaying cathedral. She, too, is headed towards extinction.

Yet we are hers, living within her trembling worriment and image of mercy. The collective masquerade dancing, she knew you to be unbearable; she is never wrong, but you are, to her, crescendos carrying her rotting dial. Her soil is as young as you, the waters as used as you. Very mortals to her ecclesiastical brilliance, evidence to her very existence. Akin to a candle diminishing its light and consuming her curtain, we are dying, anyway. Infallible humans, so dear and so desperate. She would never want to be in a world where you have never existed. We have invented so much of our grief and grappled against the violence of surviving, we have forgotten that solitude is often debasing.

You believed the window had sheathed your unavoidable denouement, but we have forever been perishable goods. Life, in all its opiates and haunting tinsels, is surmounting, too large to be perceived by your singular, isolated eyes. This is perpetuity, this is perception seemingly out of place. You dared to believe in something integrally, underwhelmingly small and to confront such in a world of overwhelming integrity when to leave for heaven is to be judged. Beautiful things can be imperceptible, catch you at the doorstep of the unknown, and seize your breath before recognition. The window is no longer aligned to your being, but the truth is as stark as paper is white and the ocean is depths; you have grown to be as great as your change.

Written by: alyssum grgio / UST Nursing Journal