Milk eyes

One doesn't expect life altering news to be delivered in a back room at Boots, but then, do we expect life alterations at any time? And yet they come, always. To live is to undergo constant processes of alteration, as we know.

I am slowly going blind.

I went to get my eyes tested- it had been over a decade since I last bothered. But I had had some fatigue , I thought, some blurring. My eyes are generally sharp, and in one way, the test I took last Saturday showed they are much the same. My dream of having to pick out a cute pair of glasses once again put off. Instead, the optician told me I have cataracts. I'm 42. I don't remember what I said, but probably some variation of “oh!”. “O” perhaps. Like an eyeball.

Later I went into my bathroom, turned off the lights and shone a torch light on my eyes. One at a time, like performing a ritual. And there, in each eye, a webbing, a ghost, a spool of milk in the blackness. Ah! O!

My new year's resolution had been, to look people in the eye more. How ridiculous! I find it a little tricky, and always have. Shyness, which I hide with speaking too much. Overwhelm. Perhaps because I had been finding seeing more difficult than I had realised.

I don't know how long I have had cataracts. To be this young with them is quite uncommon, I think. The optician speculated that they might have been present since childhood. I wonder if a gift from the bout of measles I had as a baby. Or random chance. Or they might be new, early onset.

Either way, hte ghosts in my eyes, the milk, will draw closer year on year. Perhaps faster. Until I can no longer drive, or read. Luckily there is surgery to fix it, placing an artificial lens within the eye. It has good outcomes, I'm told. I have known people who have suffered far mor devastating changes to their vision, to their health. All that will happen, ultimately, is the operation and recovery - of interest to a writer, as such experiences always are, on an intellectual and emotional research level- and afterwards, l will see through a new lens. Perhaps that is what I have to grapple with. The newness of alteration.