I want to tell you about the purple cup.
It was nothing special – just a cheap plastic cup from the supermarket. But to Kya, it was the cup. The only cup. Every drink, every meal, every snack – it had to be the purple cup. We didn’t question it. We just made sure it was always clean and always ready.
One morning, I couldn’t find it. I searched everywhere – the dishwasher, behind the sofa cushions, the car. Nothing. So I poured her juice into a blue cup instead. Same shape, same size, just a different colour. She looked at it, looked at me, and pushed it away. Not dramatically. Just… no. That wasn’t her cup. The juice might as well not have existed.
I found the purple cup twenty minutes later, wedged behind a radiator. The moment I put it on the table, she picked it up and drank like nothing had happened. Crisis over. World restored.
That was my first real lesson in understanding Kya’s routines. They weren’t preferences or habits. They were architecture – the invisible scaffolding that held her day together. Remove one piece and the whole structure wobbled.
Her routines went far beyond cups. Walking to the park, she had a route – not a route, but the route. Past the red postbox, left at the house with the wind chimes, stop at the lamp post to look at the flowers. One day I tried a shortcut through the alley. She stopped dead, turned around, and walked back to where we’d deviated. I followed. We took the long way. We always took the long way after that.
Bedtime was a sequence, not an event. Pyjamas on (the same pair, washed and dried on rotation). Teeth brushed (her toothbrush, not the spare). Into bed (left side, always). Blanket pulled up to exactly the same point on her chest. Then the light off – but not the landing light, that stayed on. If any step was out of order, we’d have to start again. Not from the missed step – from the beginning.
Friends and family sometimes found it frustrating. “Can’t you just skip it this once?” they’d ask. And I got it – from the outside, it looked rigid. Inflexible. Maybe even controlling. But from the inside? It was the opposite. These routines were the only thing giving Kya control in a world that must have felt chaotic and unpredictable.
I think about how overwhelming it must be to process everything – every sound, every texture, every unexpected change – without the filters that most of us take for granted. If I lived in that world, I’d want a purple cup too. I’d want the same route. I’d want to know exactly what happens next, because at least that bit would make sense.
We still have routines now. They’ve evolved – she’s swapped the purple cup for a particular mug, the park route for a weekend drive she knows by heart. But the need is the same, and we honour it completely. Because those routines aren’t limitations. They’re her way of saying, “This is how I make the world manageable.” And honestly? We could all learn something from that.
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