~resonanteye~

secret motivation for the picture: blindness

I just reached out for my glasses, only to find that they weren’t where I usually leave them, on the low table next  to the bed. This necessitated twenty minutes of scrambling around, on hands and knees, desperately and blindly combing the floor by feel.

I’ve been unable to see my own hand at a foot’s distance since I was about ten years old. I’m sure I couldn’t see it before that, too, only I didn’t realize it. I’ve worn glasses to swim, to run, to read. I can’t walk without them without potential danger, let alone drive. I’m attached to my tech eyes. I hate them, I love them, I sometimes wear contacts just to know what it’s like to be free of them.

Unlike some of the glasses-wearing people I know, I don’t have the option of taking them off very often. When I shower, when I sleep. Once in a while to smudge them clean on my shirt. I can’t read without them. My range of vision has shrunk a little over time, too. Six inches from my face is the natural extent of my world. If it wasn’t for mad scientists I’d live in a tiny bubble of clarity floating on a sea of blur.

Since I rarely lose my glasses, when I do lose them, I panic immediately. I’ve had boyfriends and girlfriends that just got used to late-night panic moments in which I could not see them at all, except for a blur in the dark. Waking up has never been my favorite thing (“Oh man, I’m here again? what a downer.”) but waking up and not instantly being able to see everything around me is even worse.

I’ve thought about getting laser surgery. I’ve thought about it a lot. If I had a great deal of money, I would probably do it. But there’s also a part of me that doesn’t mind the glasses. Sometimes I think about all the times in my life I have broken my glasses…I’ve broken my nose about six times now but every time I am more upset about breaking my glasses! I think about all the times I’ve scratched them, that they’ve fallen off my face. About how different sex was the first time I wore contacts. (Really, really strange, that.) About how much time I’ve spent looking through two little windows at the world.

I’ve even had the stereotypical tape in the center, hornrim, thick black frames. I had a pairr of enormous owly grandmother glasses briefly during the 80s. I had a pair of square ones, cateyes (which I still like the best), handmade wire designer glasses, and now these wide-sided modern frames, with the sccratchproof glass(that I still manage to scratch somehow)

Blur tends to make the world romantic, mysterious, interesting. I think the only author I’ve read that had anything to say about the vast blur and its many strange moments is James Thurber. He writes about going to get a new pair of glasses and seeing a hippo get on a bus, a man in gaily-colored clothing who’s about a foot tall, rolling around in the middle of the street, and a few other weird moments. That’s how it is- things are not what they seem. The world is full of anything, anything can happen. Yet other people never seem to notice how bizarre things are.

And then, I put on my glasses, and things are their usual selves again. Crisp and neat. Maybe I should lose my glasses more often.