- “Don’t hate me.”
- My husband said it while he was unwinding the bandages from my eyes.
- I was sitting up in a hospital bed. Machines beeped softly somewhere to my left. The air smelled like antiseptic and the cheap lemon soap they use in every hospital bathroom. I could feel each layer of gauze loosening, one turn at a time. Cool air touched my eyelids for the first time in two days.
- “Before you see this,” Nigel said, “I need to tell you that everything isn’t the way you think.”
- I let out a nervous laugh.
- “What does that even mean?”
- He didn’t answer. His hands kept moving. Slowly. Carefully. The way they’d always moved.
- But they were shaking.
- I’d been married to this man for twenty years. I’d felt his hands shake exactly once before, the night before our son was born.
- My heart started racing.
- The last layer came away.
- And light came through my eyelids.
- I need to go back before I tell you what I saw.
- I need to tell you how I lost it.
- I lost my sight when I was eight.
- It started as a stupid playground joke that spun out of control.
- It was the last week of August. The air was thick and hot, and the cicadas were screaming in the trees. I was on the swings in our neighborhood park, pumping my legs as hard as I could. I loved the swings more than anything. I loved that moment at the very top, when your stomach drops and for a split second you’re not attached to anything at all. Like flying.
- I remember laughing at something my neighbor’s son said.
- His name was Niye. That’s what everyone on our street called him. His baby sister couldn’t say his real name, so it stuck, and by the time I knew him nobody called him anything else.
- We’d grown up on the same street. His house was three doors down from mine, the one with the green shutters and the basketball hoop with no net. We’d been riding bikes and catching fireflies together since we were four. He was a year older than me, skinny, with a bad haircut his mom did in their kitchen, and he was always, always trying to be the funniest kid on the block.
- That summer he had a scar over his left eyebrow. A fresh one, still pink. He’d split it open on the monkey bars in July and needed four stitches. I’d called him Frankenstein for a week. He’d pretended to be mad, but he liked it.
- “Bet you can’t go higher than that!” he teased, standing behind the swing.
- “Watch me!” I shot back.
- I leaned back and kicked my legs out.
- The next thing I felt was a sharp shove from behind. Two hands, flat on my back, at the very top of the swing.
- He meant it as a joke. I know that now. He wanted to send me higher.
- But I wasn’t ready for it. I lost my grip. My small hands slipped off the chains, and I flew backward instead of forward.
- There was a sickening crack when my head hit a jagged rock near the mulch border.
- That’s the last thing I ever saw as a child. The sky tipping upside down, blue and white, and the green leaves of the oak tree over the swings.
- I don’t remember the ambulance ride.
- I remember waking up in a hospital bed and hearing my mother crying.
- I remember thinking it was the middle of the night, because everything was so dark. I remember asking her to turn on the light.
- She didn’t answer me. She just cried harder.
- I remember doctors whispering words in the hallway outside my door. Words I didn’t understand yet. “Optic nerve damage.” “Severe trauma.” “We’ll have to wait and see.”
- There was one surgery. Then another.
- But the doctors couldn’t save my vision.
- The darkness swallowed everything.
- At first, I thought it was temporary.
- I’d lie in bed in the morning and wave my hands in front of my face and wait to see them. I’d tell myself, Today. Today it’ll come back.
- I’d wait.
- I never saw them.
- Weeks turned into months. My mother took me to specialist after specialist. I learned the smell of every waiting room in our city. And eventually, somewhere around Christmas, I understood that the damage was permanent.
- I remember the exact moment I knew. It was Christmas morning. My mom put a present in my lap and said, “It’s from Grandma. It’s a book.” And I held it and felt the smooth cover and the corners, and I realized I’d never read a book with my eyes again.
- I threw it across the room.
- My mother didn’t say anything. She just went and picked it up and put it on my shelf.
- Niye never came to see me.
- His mother came. She came to the hospital every single day that first week. She brought my mom coffee and sat with her in the hallway. Once, she came into my room and held my hand and didn’t say anything. Her hand was cold, and it was shaking, and I could hear her trying not to cry.
- But Niye never came.
- When I finally got home in October, I asked my mom if I could go see him.
- She was quiet for a long time.
- “They moved, honey,” she said. “Last week. His dad got a job in another state.”
- “Where?”
- “I don’t know, sweetheart. They left in a hurry.”
- I didn’t understand it then. I thought maybe I’d done something wrong. I thought he was mad at me for falling.
- I never heard from him again.
- Or I thought I didn’t.
- I hated the dark. I hated depending on people. I hated hearing my classmates run past me in the hallways, laughing, while I traced the lockers with my fingertips and counted doors.
- I hated it when people talked to my mother instead of to me, right in front of me, like I wasn’t there. Does she need help with the stairs? Can she eat by herself?
- I hated pity most of all. You can hear pity. It has a sound. People’s voices go soft and high, like they’re talking to a puppy.
- But I refused to shut down.
- I forced myself to learn how to live in the dark.
- I learned Braille. It took me a whole year to read a page as fast as I used to read a paragraph. I cried over it at the kitchen table more times than I can count. My mother sat next to me every night, learning it too, so she could check my homework.
- I memorized rooms by counting steps. Fourteen steps from my bed to the bathroom. Twenty-two from the front door to the kitchen table. Six stairs to the basement, then a turn left.
- I trained my ears to pick up the smallest things. The shift in someone’s breathing when they were about to lie. The little catch in a voice when someone was nervous. The way footsteps sound different on wood than on tile, on carpet than on concrete.
- I learned that you can hear a smile. People think you can’t, but you can.
- I finished high school with honors. I got into university. I studied social work, because I wanted to help kids like me, kids who’d had their whole world flipped upside down at the top of a swing.
- My mother died when I was twenty. Breast cancer. It was fast. She held my hand in the hospital, the same way Niye’s mother had held it twelve years earlier.
- “You were always so brave,” she whispered. “Braver than me.”
- “I’m not brave, Mom. I just didn’t have a choice.”
- “That’s what brave is, baby.”
- After that, it was just me.
- I told myself blindness couldn’t stop me.
- But there was one thing I never told anyone.
- More than anything in the world, I dreamed of seeing again.
- Not in a big way. I didn’t dream about the Grand Canyon or the ocean. I dreamed about small things. My own face in a mirror. What color my eyes had turned out to be, as a grown woman. The words on a menu. A sunset. My mother’s face, which I was already starting to forget.
- Every year, I went to a specialist for a checkup. Most of the visits were routine. Same tests, same answers. No change. We’re sorry. Maybe someday.
- But I still clung to hope.
- I couldn’t help it.
