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.

Glasses make the eyes double paned window to the soul…

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 their 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 too personal examinations. They see me with perfect clarity, yet I can hardly make out the dark shapes which I know represent the indention 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 worse 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.

by Gabriel Miller

Young and writing. Grew up in Holly Michigan, an suburbian farmtown in Oakland County, and went to school at Holly High. Once lived in Iowa, used to crash in Canton, lived in Birdgeport for some time, and now trying to stick out a philosophy major at Northern Michigan University. Motto is to live easy, experience what you can, and always stay creative.

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