The world appears before my eyes, strange images of indistinct shape. Like looking through a magnifying glass that’s held just a little too far from your face, my world has no hard edges. I see colors, a blur next to a blur. My pillow is blue, and my sheets are red. Looking down my vision gets worse, things that appear far off in the distance are mere feet from my nose.
As I slide from my bed my feet hit the floor, I grope for my small, invisible glasses. They are not where I put them! I always put them in the same spot. I need to find my glasses or when I look in the mirror, I won’t see my face looking back at me, only a splotch on the wall, no eyes, no ears, no mouth or nose are visible unless I have my glasses to look through.
My desk is messy; I pile my life on it. I search frantically looking for my glasses, they are impossible to find by sight for I am virtually blind. Feeling through my books, papers, pens, wires and food, I search for the cold frame work of steel that is my glasses. My fingers dance around my desk, combing with a relentless thirst to quite their work, they pick up the slack dropped from my eye’s fuzzy gaze. I hear a crunch! My fingers have failed, but my toes and ears have succeeded. The only problem is that now my glasses are squished, and insist on sitting crooked on my face.
No matter how I twist and bend them, they will never go back to how they were. I give up and put them on. I’ve dealt with this problem more than once and the lopsided feeling goes away after a day or so. It is kind of fun to see the world with one eye higher than the other.
My clear vision is such a brief respite. I take a once over to make sure the world hasn’t changed, and then I take the lenses off to wash away my residual fatigue. Sleep never fully cures me of the strain of life’s woes. I take my time, to get clean doesn’t require perfect vision, it is one of the few things I can do with my eyes closed. When I get out of the shower, I put my glasses back on then wait as my eyes melt the condensation from the lenses. I’m out of my towel and into my pants. Looking in the mirror, I greet my eyes, my ears, my mouth and nose. I see myself reflected back, and I smile, because I know it’s a lie.
As I walk into the hallway I pass door after door. I like to look at the decorations that people put on these doors. My glasses aren’t perfect, and although they improve my vision I still have to get rather close before I can see any significant detail. I don’t stop because I’m in a hurry, but as these beautiful, creative works of art pass through my skewed windows of vision, my eye follows them past the rim and I see the omnipresent reminder: My world has no hard edges.
What I see through my glasses is not real, the world that I see when I wake up, is. When my glasses are not on my face, people lose the identity that they show in their appearance. A girl’s physical beauty is melted away, a boy’s physical strength disappears, an old women and a young man become exactly the same mesh of colors. It is this haze of my vision that allows me to see people for who they truly are and what they truly mean to me. I can see past the outward appearance and look at the actual beauty of their character.
I think about this as I continue out the door and down the stairs, I like to make noise with my feet and hands by banging the stairwell in syncopated and arrhythmic patterns. The brisk cold air hits my face as I head toward breakfast. Many times when I first meet people I like to look at them from over the rim of my glasses, I look at their face for any signs of emotions that are still visible through the haze, these are the signs that show a persons character because these are the ones that even blindness can not hide. As I sit at breakfast I stare blankly into space, listening to the buzz of conversations. I pick out bits of information and guess as to what the context is. It’s a fun game I play with myself. Sometimes a friend comes up and interrupts my game. I don’t mind. I just change the rules. We start a conversation and I challenge myself to find the funny things hidden in the mundane questions like “are you doing anything fun today?”, “how was your weekend?”, and “what are you eating?”. While looking through the eyes Man created for me, I choose to see the world with the eyes God gave me. There are no hard edges. There are always details to be found, hidden by our current perception of the world. I, however, have been given two different viewpoints, one just behind my corneas and the other just in front of them, and I use these viewpoints to my advantage everyday, because I have invented the fourth dimension, the dimension of perspective, and that is where I wake up in the morning. Take that Stephen Hawking!!! Steven Dawson is sticking it to yah!
