Glasses

Sometimes I wish I could see perfectly.  20/20 vision floats around my head, whispering its sweet words of finally having a body that actually does what a body is supposed to do.  It is no great disaster in the modern era to be in need of glasses, not even, as I am, with the awful vision of 2700/20.  In our world now I can slip on a pair of spectacles and move along just as everyone else, albeit, a little more sophisticated looking.  Yet, in the wild I would have died as an infant, and this fact is a hard truth I have had to deal with.  My body does not work.  It would fail in natural situations unless someone with an unconditional heart had been willing to help me my entire life.  It detracts from certain beauties, glasses.  I cannot lie on a bed and watch tv and drift off to sleep, that is, I cannot without the fear of waking up to a smashed pair of eyes beside me.  I cannot lay underneath the starlight and let live the night without also not being able to see the wonders of the natural world.  I cannot go swimming or gawk at the finely shaped bodies of women my age on a beach trip with friends.  I can hardly even identify a friend from a few meters away without previously having spent enough time with that person to have memorized their clothing, hair, and stance.  Glasses may not be on par with blindness, deafness, or serious disability, but it is a handicap. 

So sometimes I envision my decision to acquire perfect vision.  Yet, with this new beauty I may attain, there is another kind of beauty I would lose.  A part of myself would wash away with the laser ramifications, a part which could never be brought back.  I would never again see as I do now.  The world looks different to me than I imagine someone with perfect vision sees the world.  Even with my glasses I am always seeing through a window.  Everything without the glasses is fuzzy and blurred, yet not quite like censoring a show might do for tv or glass panes might do to the outside.  It would be impossible for me to explain exactly how I see the world just as it is impossible to put into words the colour red for a blind person or to explain how The Beatles sound to someone who has been deaf there whole life.  I wonder, sometimes, what the world would look like if I could see a tree a mile away without help or hindrance.  What do branches or words on a page look like without glasses fuzzy glare or the double vision letters which seem to follow me.  Would it even look different?  Am I only imagining a nonexistence clearer universe?  Or does everyone see a slight blur around even the sharpest objects? 

I feel free without my glasses on, as if I am naked.  I feel as if I am the real me, unable to see, unable to distinguish to judge the world.  But I also feel scared.  I feel as if no one will help me and I won’t make it.  I feel as if the world will judge my clumsy unsure gestures and all to personal examinations.  They see me with perfect clarity, yet I can hardly make out the dark shapes which I know represent the indentions of their eyes.  I am insecure without them.  There was once a time, before second grade, in which I possessed no glasses.  But my eyes are far worst now and I am no longer used to my eyes.  They are foreign and rudimentary.  They do not work.  I do not understand them and it would seem to anyone who knows me, and now myself, that my glasses create my character; yet this is not true.  My glasses are the little helper which I have grown so dependent on, a little persona I have built for years wearing them.  There is something about me which exists outside the glasses, something basic within myself.  If I am able to take off my glasses around you, and by this I do not mean the necessity for sleep, I mean if I can take them off and look at you and have a real conversation (even more than if I can sit naked) you have begun to understand who I really am.  Something which cannot see the world in the way others do.  Something weird, sort of wishful, with wanderlust and an eye for beauty, something scared and insecure, optimist about the world but pessimistic about my present state.  Whether it be your clothing, your magazine, your burger, your smile, your alcohol, or your games; this is what the glasses hide.

Beauty

                A model, a superstar, with thighs so perfectly chiseled, breasts push-up, lips full, and hair shimmering is not beautiful.  Life in perfect bliss, a heaven where all your wishes come true is not beautiful.  Imagine someone swimming.  Twirling and swirling in a pool, two people preforming a dance, doing circles around each other.  Imagine the perfectly enacted strut of a business man, high power, mindset, determination steadfast.  Imagine a swan gliding across a lake, beak down and body slender.  These do not show beauty.  Beauty is the actuality of swimming.  Swirl and twirl, these two bodies so elegant, still must push their way through the water.  They wave their hands and kick their legs, they sweat and they breathe hard as they bob up and down the surface.  The man walks awkwardly, stepping forward and realizing he forgot to kiss his wife, miss stepping.  A swan must survive in the wild, kill when needed, and take pain when hindered.  The swan’s heart beats, pumping blood through its body.  The swan’s lungs contract and retract, filtering oxygen from the air, rusting the swan’s body oh so slowly.  Beauty is this naturality of the universe.  Beauty is the mistake.  Birth is beautiful, pain, blood, tears, and all, birth creates a life which will spend many years being hurt, crying, and feeling lonely.  Birth creates this life which sees joy and loves and let’s live because it knows what pain is.  Beauty is this silent struggle, beauty is birds calling in a forest each surviving another day and singing all the while.  The pop songs and perfect pictures, the romance novels written so perfectly so as to make you want them, the fatty foods which we all love so much; these things show no beauty.  They are the essence of all which we consider good, all which is the light, but with none of the shadows.  Yin without yang and this is ugly, unnatural.  An apple is beautiful for it is sweet and savory while being tart and rigid.  An old guitar is beautiful for it lights into the room with glee and music while twinging and buzzing, sounds of a worn instrument.  Women are beautiful, imperfect skin, blemishes, periods, and faults of personality.  Men are beautiful no matter how strong or who calls them “a man,” despite their decaying age or their laughable youth.  Humanity is beautiful and nature is beautiful.  Spring is beautiful for flowers are born and bees buzz, yet rain each day, winds, illness, and a muck of backyards.  Winter colds, glistening snows; Fall oranges, slowly concealing of life; Summer greens, Summer hot, hot, blistering sun.  It is beauty which is the two of one.  Beauty is none of the perfections without all of the failures.  No superstar is beautiful without the years of practice and patience.  God does not need free will to justify pain.  God needs pain to justify glee. 

Traffic Light and Dylan

The traffic light blinked off and on.  Red, blink, red, blink, red…  Dylan’s blinker flashed in tune, indicating that the car would soon be veering right.  No cars were on the road.  It was night and nothing much was happening at all.  Dylan just sat there.   He had just dropped off his oldest son, Bobby, at football.  Another day, another practice, some more driving.  Tomorrow he would wake up and go to work.  That’s what he’d do.  Wake up, go to work, come home, drive Bobby to football, go to sleep.  Another day would pass, he would get just that much older; the lines in his face would deepen and his bones would be that much sorer.   He would wake up and do the same thing all over, again and again and again.  He would wake up and his hair would become grayer, the love for his wife shallower, the caring for his children bitterer.  He would wake up to the alarm, buzzing and awful, screech from Hell, and clamour out of bed.  He would wake up.  Wake up, Dylan… 

          A car honked behind him.  Dylan was lost.  Where was he?  Blinking red light, that’s right, forever blinking red light.  Red, blink, red, blink, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, blink…  Dylan thought he was hallucinating; for surely the light had stayed red, but then he saw it was just the same as ever, red and blink over and over, and he knew he had been hallucinating.  Just the same, one more thing to add to the list of problems.  The car’s lights stared at Dylan’s back, angry that he had not moved.  Dylan stared at the light, watching it blink in tune with his lights, in tune with his eyes opening and closing.  The road was empty ahead, a car waited behind.  Eventually he heard a shout from the side and the car drove past, a finger was shown but Dylan wasn’t sure why, or how, or when…?...?  That was the question, right?   Something was up.  He felt crazy, all these thoughts floating around completely unattached from ideas, like decapitated heads floating in the cloud, clouds of headless bodies.  He shook his head.  Oh, the light, the light, right,  the blinking of the light.  That’s what’s up, up, up, and away towards the sky, towards God. 

God?  Was he real, would he do this to Dylan, all this nothingness?  This dull existence, this decrepted lifestyle.  Everyday the same thing.  How could he coup.  The light blinked on, God’s voice spoke, yes, no, yes, no, yes… God doesn’t know.  God doesn’t know why God had made Dylan this way, if god had made Dylan this way.  God is just another chump on the street, watching Dylan waste his life away.  God had mae Bobby and Mommy and Wife, all once loved, but now, with Dylan’s growing weariness, Dylan’s decaying mind, Dylan no longer cared.  This God did, but did not know.

 Why would it be Dylan sitting in a car on an empty street.  Of the people in the world, why him?  God had no answer, Dylan had no answer.  He realized could go off and leave, could go straight, what if he did go straight?  Bobby would miss him, at least, he guessed he would miss him.  What if he went left?  Dylan supposed then Bobby wouldn’t care, but his wife might miss him.  So hard to decide, which universe to choose.  What was the answer to all his problems…? Right, the light.  The light existed still, solid and in front of him.  God couldn’t say, he couldn’t say, and it wasn’t Bobby’s fault. 

          Go forward or go straight or go left, that’s the trouble.  He could go either way, change his whole life around.  Would that be fair to Bobby?  Wife?  Would it even be fair to himself to just leave?  Would he get bettered, would his clouded, shambled, mind regain health?  Something troubled him.  It was the light?  No, not the red, the red made sense.  It was the left.  It wasn’t Bobby’s fault, but it might be wife’s.  ‘Mid-life depression happens for a reason, you know,’ God would say.  So, if it isn’t Bobby’s fault going left would be the answer, because then Bobby won’t miss him.  Right?  Right, oh, right, he had to go right.  Left wasn’t an option.  This wasn’t a land of dream-believe, this was life and life meant choices and choices meant responsibility and responsibility meant going right.  But still, Dylan day-dreamed about the dreamed day where right wasn’t the right answer.  Home wasn’t the house to be.  Wife wasn’t the woman to have.  None of it made sense.  Why go right when right might not be right.  It was still his choice life and responsibility aside.   Figured that’s how it goes though, choices and decisions.   That’s how life is.  Might be his choice, and that was nice, but he did eventually have to choose or he’d be stuck at the light forever.  Decayed mind, depression, unloved wife, football son Bobby aside, he had to make a choice and move his car from where it was parked.  Thus the car moved from its stationary position.