Watercolor

To live as a girl who didn’t understand her eyesight also had to learn early on that the truth is nonnegotiable. Long before I understood how my vision worked, I knew about gravity. My life was a constant and repeated cycle of falling or tripping over my own feet. I was a child who was always colliding with doorframes and tripping over objects that seemed to appear out of thin air. In those days, I was quiet, stubborn, and ignorant; I did not realize my glasses were dirty because no matter how perfectly clear the glass was, no matter how flawlessly transparent the lenses were, the world remained exactly the same. I believed the blur was simply part of existence. 

When people would look at me, their eyes always snagged on my frames. “You missed a spot,” they would say, pointing a careless finger toward my face. They assumed the fix was simply more effort—wipe it down, get stronger lenses, squint a little harder until the edges do not look so foggy.

Because they kept saying it, I believed them. I thought the cause was out of my own laziness, not my own self. 

I do not remember the day I learned how to clean my glasses. Such a long time ago. More than a decade has passed. If I had to make an assumption though, I would guess that I would have stood on my tiptoes to reach the sink, twisting the heavy knob until the water ran lukewarm. Pulling the plastic frames from my face, I would plunge the room into a deeper, heavier fog. I would hold the lenses under the stream. I would breathe a hot cloud of air across the surface, watching it mist over, and I would begin to scrub frantically with the hem of my shirt. I would rub until my fingers ached. I would have polished and pressed, holding them up to examine them under the yellow light of my house, only to find new, grease-smeared hues. I would breathe on them again, wiping harder, smudging them with streaks until the reflection in the mirror looked worse instead of better. Just a little more, I would tell myself, driven by a childish hope. If I just polish them a little more, things will finally be clear. 

I would slide the plastic hooks back over my ears. 

The smudges would be gone, but the world would not snap to attention. The edges of the sink, the drawers of the bathroom cabinet, and the doorway would remain soft, bleeding into one another like wet ink. 

As I grew older, I learned that clarity is not always about the glass. Sometimes the blur is inside you, combined with how you see your version of the world, but a lot of people do not understand that. They do not know that no matter how long you rub, some edges will always stay blurry and unclear. 

And yet, I have discovered a strange beauty in my visual impairment. When light glows at night, I see halos in the dark, as if every streetlamp is a star with its own galaxy. They seem to explode into massive, radiant hues, sometimes almost blinding me more than my own eyesight ever does. Faces blur into undetailed shapes that my mind has to fill in, like living watercolor portraits of people that shift depending on where I am standing. 

It is not less, it is just different. 

In my eyes, the world is an impersonator’s piece of artwork, and I am the only person who gets to live inside of it. Now, when people look at my glasses and say, “You missed a spot,” I only smile. I think of my condition, and of how sometimes, it is not about what you are missing, but rather about how beautifully you are built to perceive the world from different eyes.