The Ball Pit
He has loved ball pits since he was small. Before he could speak, he watched Blippi visit them on YouTube and replayed the segments. The big indoor playgrounds in Los Angeles, in Phoenix, in places he had never been but had walked through hundreds of times on a screen six inches from his face or on YouTube on the TV.
On his tenth birthday, in May 2024, we flew with him to LOL Kids Club in Ontario, California. It was a place he had watched Blippi visit. He had been studying the layout for a long time before we ever told him we were going. He recognized the entrance when we pulled up. He walked toward the doors with the specific intensity of someone whose body had finally arrived at a place his mind already lived in.
The trip worked. He was compliant on the plane, and he spent hours in the ball pit. There was no warrior course over it, and there was no timer.
That trip is two years old now. The cancer is eight months old. We are home in Lafayette, and the ball pit he has access to is the one at Urban Air.
The Urban Air ball pit is not really a destination. It is a safety net. A four-path warrior course is built directly above it; it includes parallel obstacle paths that kids run through, along with hanging rings, swinging beams, climbing nets, and suspended ladders. The pit underneath is there in case a kid falls. However, most kids do not fall. Most kids complete the course and exit at the platform on the far side.
My son figured out the system. He picks the easiest of the four paths and jumps in at the middle.
He is using the apparatus inverted. The course is for kids who can complete it. The pit is for kids who can’t. He has built a sanctuary out of failure protection.
When the building is busy, the staff come over. They have to. Other kids are waiting to use the course, and the pit needs to be clear for the next fall. The staff do not address my son directly. He wears a black wristband on top of his regular Urban Air wristband. which lets the workers know that he is non-verbal. They look for me on the bench instead.
Sir, would you mind getting your son out of the ball pit?
I get up. I walk to the edge. I tell him it is time. The staff give him time to get up, and he does not resist. He climbs out at his own pace. The balls roll off his shoulders.
We come back when there are fewer people. Weekday afternoons in Houston, mostly. The Houston Heights location is bigger and emptier than the Lafayette one in the middle of a Tuesday. When the building is quiet, the staff let him stay. They watch him watch his phone in the balls, and they leave him alone. The employees are different every visit; none of them remember him from last time. The black wristband is what connects him to the kindness.
He starts on his feet. Then he sits. Then he lies back. The balls close over his chest, his shoulders, his neck. The phone keeps playing through his noise-canceling headphones. He has a lanyard around his neck attached to his phone because he is clumsy with his phone and drops it sometimes. After a few minutes, only the side of his head is visible above the surface, along with the hand holding the phone and a small portion of his arm. He keeps his eyes closed. He is not asleep; he is at rest.
He disappears.
I sit on the bench at the side of the pit and watch him. The other parents are also on benches, watching their own children. None of the other children disappear the way he does. They climb the netting and slide down, and they throw the balls at each other. They yell. They fall. They run.
My son does not yell or run. He stays where he is. The balls hold his weight without demanding anything from him. The headphones cancel the noise of the other children. The phone keeps the videos coming. He has built, or we have built for him, the conditions where he can stop being scanned. The world contracts to the size of the cartoon playing six inches from his ears.
I take a picture of him submerged in the balls and send it to my wife. She knows what the picture means. The boy is regulated. The boy is at peace. We can both rest for ten minutes.
The worries arrive on the bench anyway.
The Chevron contract that ran for nineteen years and ended last August. The space where that monthly check used to be. The new contracts I have not yet found to fill the space. Whether the rent payments will come in on the first of the month. The empty warehouse unit I have been trying to lease that has been vacant since November. The math on each empty unit, recalculated weekly. The next 28-day blood draw. The PSA reading. The Akeega side effects. The MyChart push notifications I have started turning off and turning back on. And underneath all of it, whether I will live long enough to share the work of a lifetime with my wife. Our son will need someone to manage his life for as long as he is alive. We had been planning to do that work together for the next forty or fifty years. The cancer has put a different number on that. We do not know what the number is yet.
The worries arrive in rotation. They have been arriving in rotation for eight months. They arrive in the car. They arrive in the shower. They arrive at three in the morning. They arrive on the bench at Urban Air while I am watching my son disappear.
I used to be able to disappear too.
Long-haul flights across oceans, at night, in a window seat with the cabin quiet and the engine hum running underneath everything. I would lift the window shade. The nighttime horizon at thirty-five thousand feet is an abyss, a single line where the dark of the ocean meets the slightly less dark of the sky. There is nothing to do at that altitude. There is no decision to make. The plane is going where it is going. The body is in a chair. The mind, for the first time in months, has nothing to track.
I would disappear in my thoughts for an hour, sometimes two. The aircraft hum was the only sound. The horizon was the only thing to look at. The worries did not arrive at thirty-five thousand feet because the conditions made them impossible. There was just the dark window, the engine hum, and the body in the chair.
I have not taken a long-haul flight since the diagnosis. The only flight in 2026 was a daytime hop to Philadelphia. Daylight is the wrong condition. The disappearance requires the dark, the horizon, the hum, and a destination far enough away that the body has to give up trying to manage it.
I could still buy the ticket. The conditions are still technically available, but the math has changed. The body is different now. The money is different now. The reasons for the trip would be different now.
The disappearance that used to be available is theoretically still available. It is just not, in practice, available to me anymore.
I look up from the bench. My son lifts his head briefly out of the balls. He looks around without focusing on anything. He sees me but does not register me. He settles back into the pit. The balls close over him again.
I take another picture and send it to my wife.
I wish I could disappear in my thoughts with no worries like him.
The boy is regulated. The boy is at peace.
I am on the bench.
Until next week,
Eddie