Catching Up
On Wednesday I ran into a man who lost his sight. I’d met him once before, when he could still see fairly well. He didn’t explain what was happening then, but now he told me the whole story.
The doctors couldn’t explain it, just declared it inevitable. They all said the same thing, even though he asked for and received multiple opinions. He clicked his tongue, and silently walked home.
What do you do, when you lose your sight? They gave him pamphlets and books to read, but he took them as an affront. Like putting a clock in a man’s hands and telling him when it runs out, so will his time on this earth.
What do you keep? What do you forget? He asked himself this while he waited for the bus. Staring off into the middle distance, which is soon to become his existence. Eyes open without seeing. So in the ark of his mind, he decided to store colors. He wanted to remember vibrancy.
He went primary. If he could remember those, he could cover off on the in-betweens. Also, he was having trouble remembering green. He’d stare at a verdant plant in full sunlight, close his eyes, two minutes later it was gone.
Like a digital camera, he worked to fill his memory with images. He questioned photographers on their craft, arriving at the conclusion that it’s all about light. Sunlight. That was when we first met. I was the one who showed him how to use a light meter.
But the strength of light wasn’t exactly what he was after. He carried around a small white square in his wallet. A white balance. As the vignette of blindness began to creep in on his vision, he’d find a spot in the afternoon sun to sit and gather the gold off the square.
The doctors were right, it was inevitable. Like the emptiness of space between stars, the darkness expanded, pushing the vibrancies he’d stored away further and further apart. The white card faded in front of his eyes.
He had already read all the pamphlets and books the doctors gave him. It felt like years ago. He’d learned to use a walking stick. He’d learned to keep track of the sums of money in his wallet, arranged his apartment to appeal to his current life. He’d prepped for everything they told him.
But it wasn’t enough, he told me. He felt like an astronaut, stepping out of the capsule into space. Interstellar space. Even in the city he grew up in, the expanses between buildings felt huge. The yawning gaps between crosswalks. The prairies of parking lots. The endless stairs.
After a while, things took shape. They began to correspond to the vibrant colors in his head, separated by the negative space he never realized was there. A universe, all his own, placed on top of the old one. What was it like, to be the sole astronomer? He smiled and clicked his tongue, eyes staring purposefully into the middle distance.
“It’s brilliant.”
