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.
