As in, I hope. I hope I’ll look back on this and laugh, rather than mark the beginning.

You know how, in movies and TV shows, a character cheats death or dodges at the right time, and they pledge that then, they were going to change? That every day is borrowed time, and they could have died, if not for timing or their reflexes or Bruce Willis. That today was the first day of the rest of their life?

So, I have shitty eyesight. My left eye is a lot worse than my right, and my right is pretty bad. I can’t have lasik because my eyes twitch, and whichever eye I’m not concentrating with decides to move on its own, which looks like lazy eye but kinda isn’t.

ANYWAY, I share that to say this.

This morning I woke up and my left eye..was just shit. Everything is blurry and in triples, and while I know my left eye is bad, it wasn’t this bad when I went to sleep. So, something’s up. I made it through a day at work, and am writing this down in hopes that this is an anomaly. That this all goes away with a lot of water and vitamins. My head doesn’t hurt, I’m in no distress, but my left eye is barely functioning right now.

So, I’m hoping.

And today is going to have to be the first day of the rest of my life. Because things involving my eyes, whether tests or the thought of contacts or, just, ANYTHING, makes me a very scared little boy again, scared I won’t be able to see. Scared I won’t be able to see what I’m drawing, or writing. Scared I can’t recognize people, scared I can’t pick out the record I want. I know there are people who have made it their entire lives without being able to distinguish anything more than light and shadow, and that they’ve found purpose without it, but to have and lose is worse, in my opinion, than never having at all.

I have to go to work, and computers lurk there, so I’ll have to deal with that, but what I don’t know vastly outpaces what I do. My right eye is the strongest of the two, yet it is largely unaffected. Why? How?

I’m living without the knowledge of if I’ll wake up one day and I won’t see anything. Then I’ll regret the things I didn’t make, sights I didn’t see. I’ll be saddened at the people I couldn’t recognize, and be relegated to the voices of the people I love.

And I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think I can handle that. And that’s just real.

So, my new lease on life begins today. Keep my eyes open and focused…as long as I can.