I can see again. A revelation! A miracle. A cruel joke.
It’s genuinely deranged how bad my vision had gotten—how I simply adjusted to the blur, like a frog boiling in its own oblivion. I had a pair of reading glasses once. Lost them. Never replaced them. Why? Because I am stubborn as a rabid loon, committed to the long con of self-destruction.
But the fair animation union, in its begrudging mercy, tossed me a bone—(a bone life preserver?) Limited vision insurance. A ticket to clarity, however fleeting. And now, with fresh lenses perched upon my aging skull, I am horrified. The world was this sharp all along? How did I tolerate such smeared reality? No wonder I stopped reading real books, resigned instead to squinting at a Kindle cranked to “grandma mode.”
That’s it. If only I could buy glasses for my flogged, fogged, waterlogged old brain. Then—then—life might actually be tolerable.