I haven't seen. I haven't seen in a long time. There was the day they took my eyes, said I wouldn't need them. I told them I did, but then they leaned in on me, leaned hard until I couldn't move, couldn't breathe. They stuck a cold metal device against my head until I felt it burrowing up against bone, and then a pop, and the milky white ball pulled out into that device and one side went blank. I could see the bridge of my nose, could see the device pulling away with that white marble inside as they deposited it in a plastic bag, and then saw the metal coming straight for the other eye, saw it enclose my socket like a bird in a cage, and then static, the kind you see right as the TV goes black.
They said they'd give my eyes to someone else. Whoever that was would be grateful to have my eyes. They'd use them for damn sure, get some good use out of them, see colors like they'd never seen before: the bluest of skies, deep greens, hard oranges and browns. They'd see and write songs and stories and poems about the world they could see. And me? I'd live in darkness.
They said it didn't matter. I'd get used to it eventually. Most people functioned just fine without seeing, and, since they couldn't see, they wouldn't know that I couldn't see either. We'd comfort ourselves and each other by groping in the dark, bumping into each other haphazardly until we learned how to navigate without seeing, and become quite comfortable in our soft gray coccoon. And this would be just fine.
Most days this IS enough, and I've forgotten what it was like when I could see. I didn't really use them. They grew weak, and those who took my eyes said the person who now has them knows how to use them and they have grown strong indeed. These eyes--my eyes--are doing so well!! On someone else!!
But there are the days when I want to see again. I don't know how to frame the pictures of what I remember in such a way to bring them into focus. I don't have the textures. The colors aren't right. I've forgotten how to create depth. It's days like these when my sockets ache, missing what they once had, knowing now like I'd never known these things then.
After a while the sockets begin to scar over, the tissue becomes hard, unreceptive to the white malleable orbs. The fluids that once flowed, lubricating the eyeball tissue dry up. It will take more than a couple new eyeballs to get me to see again. Some days I wonder if it would even be possible again, if the nerves would reconnect, the bed would become soft again, the fluid flow. It would take a miracle.
Years have passed, and though I can no longer see I've begun having dreams that I'm walking again in a world with texture and color and distance, and beauty. They say the world has changed since I last saw, that it is crumbling all around us because there are so few sighted left, that some things are better not to see. But I don't care. Sometimes in these dreams I even see myself flying, above this world, above green treetops and through blue space, above skyscrapers and farmers' fields, and I wonder if our dreams remind us of the things we could once do, but have forgotten.
The other day, it's only been whispered so I don't know if it's true, they said that someone, pitted sockets and all, had begun to see again. . .
3 comments:
This one is something else. I could write forever on this one. I will restrain myself.
All I will say is that it is making me think of Dante's blindness as he wrote Paradiso, the part of the Divine Comedy that was so dependent on sight and light. What does it mean to see? Did you ever read A Wrinkle in Time? One of the characters didn't have the sense of sight, so she couldn't understand what things looked like, she only understood what things were like. She said: It must be a very limited thing, this seeing. Maybe blindness taps us into what reality truly is. I don't know if that was the point of your post, but this is what I think of.
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