Short Story: The Day That I Went Blind

Blindness always seemed to me a silent thing. The lights go out, and suddenly the world is quiet. Let me tell you, sometimes I wish it were true. So that I could drift off into oblivion, evaporate into perfect boredom and give as little as I receive in the minutes that do not matter, filling the days that mean nothing and feel like nothing and will be remembered as less than nothing because there is nothing whatsoever to remember them by.

But no. I hear socks slipping onto my feet and ask them to please, please try to whisper like they used to. Car engines outside my window rip through my darkness like elephants braying into my mind. My fork against my plate is like the wind chimes you have to put away for the winter. All music is unbearable because it makes my heart scream and that thing never shuts up once it gets started. And I live a block away from a fire station, and fire engines are like death, and many times I have wished for the crackling to come get me.

I do like memories though, and the sounds they make.

I like to remember casual glances. The casual glance down east 8th street at a silent sky turning purple and orange over spring’s greenest leaves (rustle, rustle). The casual glance across the bar revealing Saskia’s intense stare that says “please, get this guy away from me” (clink, clink). The casual glance over my shoulder that catches two beautiful brown eyes looking out at me over a math book (skin across a blanket).

The last person I could love with my eyes. This silence cannot be described.

I like to remember the color choices I used to make. Three years ago I spent 45 minutes in Pearl Paints squinting at 457 variations of white. I chose a creamy “Winter Wonderland” for my walls and liked how it contrasted with the nothin’ fancy white of my ceiling. I used to work a lot with Excel and liked to choose my background colors carefully. I would highlight a whole section and click a color square to make it pale blue, or bright yellow, or transitional gray. I often wish now that I could highlight the dark room around my head and click a button to make it fill with red (I’m in a hurry), fill with green (central park for lunch?), and fill with orange (don’t blow out the candles).

When I need a hit of color, apples are an easy thing to remember. The green of the granny smith I swear I can still see. Golden Delicious are a bit less yellow than a lemon, a bit more than lemon sorbet. But what kind of red were the apples from the farmer’s market? “Which are the sweetest in the world?” I asked him, and he said “There, those red ones.” That was last summer.

Other colors I want to forget as desperately as I want to remember. My hair was a rustic red tan and my skin an uncreamy white, my towel was pale blue for my body and ripe peach for my hair, and my CD player had a pale green LCD screen, my bed was terracotta red with a beige duvet and pillows like the 4 o’clock sky, and his body on those sheets was milk chocolate in the winter and coco gelato in the summer, and my toes were always painted in “Rummy,” and Sunday’s croissants were a welcoming tan, and homeless Patrick’s nails were gray and pink at the same time, and my brother’s eyes were bigger and bluer than anything I have ever seen.