At the Eye Hospital

Taped to the side of a letter tray on the receptionist’s desk is a copy of the Workman’s Prayer, printed in rainbow ink. It’s pretty, and I tell her so. You need it around here, she says. In the first exam room, the nurse checks my eyes with contacts in and then out. Then she asks me to follow her. I want to ask how far, but I don’t – I just try to follow closely enough to see where she’s going. She leaves me in a second waiting room, where I dig in my bag for my glasses. A woman in a bright orange dress and head wrap is walking up and down the hallway. When a nurse asks her if she needs help, she says no, she’s just afraid of heights, and we’re on the twelfth floor. I’m not afraid of heights, but when she says that, I look out the wide windows at the Old City rooftops, and I do feel a little light – not dizzy, but almost.

I’m called into another examining room, this one with low light. I close the door behind me, against the waiting room. The doctor takes my glasses and puts them somewhere. He checks my eyes with bright lights and then says he wants to dilate them. I lean my head back for drops, he wipes the excess off my cheeks with a tissue. I’ll be back when you’re dilated, he says, and then he goes, leaving the door open. I don’t know where my glasses are. I don’t know how long it will take for my eyes to dilate. I look down at my hands, pink earthworms. My red hair elastic like a gash on my wrist. In the lobby, the movement of a black ponytail swinging against blue scrubs. A blob of a foot bobs, moves up to scratch a leg. I hear people speaking Spanish and the pages of magazines turning. The doctor comes back and tells me I have tiny scratches on my corneas, common with contact wearers. He says if I had come into the emergency room, he would have put me on antibiotic eye drops, four times a day, and told me not to wear my contacts for a week. The head doctor comes in and confirms it -- no contacts until the antibiotics have run their course.

My grandmother sent me money for contacts as an eighth-grade graduation present. The day I got the check was one of the happiest of my life. I had already worn glasses for six years by then. The day I got my glasses had been a happy day, too; my mom took me to Dunkin Donuts after, and we sat at the counter to eat. I kept twirling on my stool to see out the big front windows. Everything was suddenly crisp and new. Either I'd never known or had forgotten that all the world could be so detailed. But my joy at having glasses diminished as I got older. I was clumsy and awkward, always getting hit in the face with some kind of ball. By the end of junior high I had started dreaming about paddling our canoe out into the middle of the lake, where the water was 90 feet deep, dropping my glasses and letting them sink away forever. When I called my grandmother to thank her for the money, I was so excited and chirpy that she didn't recognize my voice. I had to put my mom on the phone to explain.

Now, as I leave the dark examining room, my glasses slide down my nose, and I have to keep pushing them up. I only ever wear them in the familiar environment of my apartment. I can't remember wearing glasses for a full day since I got my contacts. If I have to wear them for a week, I’ll need to adjust them somehow, get new stems. The glasses shop is only one floor down, so I decide to take the stairs. But when I get into the concrete stairwell, I realize that the door has locked behind me. The ninth-floor door is locked, too. I try not to panic as I go down the stairs, one floor and then another until I reach the roof level of the parking garage. I think about going out, but am afraid I’ll get stuck out there somehow, and the sun is baking hot, 100 degrees on the ground.

The stairwell feels hotter and hotter the farther I go down, and then finally I come out through an emergency door onto the street. The sunlight is so bright that I can hardly keep my eyes open. It’s like a recurring dream I have, when something fun is happening, like skating on the lake or talking to my parents on the porch of my their house, but it’s too bright to see. In the dream, I have to squint and shade my eyes with my hand, and still the light gets whiter and brighter.

On Walnut Street, I creep through sun and shadows, afraid of every streetlight, with no peripheral vision to see the cars turning left through the crosswalks. In the past few months I’ve missed the early days of living in the city, when I felt alert to everything. This is a new way of seeing, but everything is blurred, distorted, and I feel drugged. I blunder along toward la Colombe, on Rittenhouse, where I will meet my writing group. Ten blocks to go. My glasses slide down, I push them up. I should just go home, but I want to see my friends. I want to pretend I don’t know that every day could be like this.