My eyes were dilated last week. On purpose, I mean. I went to the eye doctor for the first time in years just to humor my internet-assisted hypochondria, which had been pretty eyeball-obsessed ever since my trippy visual migraine experience this spring. After that, I began to pay more attention to the little floaty things in my vision and decided, thanks to some conscientous web research, that it all had to mean that my retinas were slowly withering away like grapes in the fridge, and I had to call this to some noble doctor’s attention ASAP so that he could perform laser surgery on me. Not like I wanted surgery, of course, but when your eyes are turning into rotten cocktail onions you do what you gotta do, right? And figured I could use some new glasses, too.
Everyone I knew kept warning me about the eye dilation part; how I was supposed to wear sunglasses, avoid driving, and sit in dark rooms for hours and hours. It sounded terrible to me. I imagined the second I had the drops put in my eyes I would surely clutch my head screaming while the world turned day-glo colors! I’d be knocked down by the glare and I’d have to go live underground! I would have to cancel my plans, seeing as how I was sentenced to at least half a day in some kind of gloomy Goth exile. I was late to my appointment on purpose.
But it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t even know what was happening until the nurse led me to a dim room and left me alone for awhile. They hadn’t explained why I was there: I thought the appointment was over and now they were allowing me to just sit in this nice room for a spell to calm down from the mild trauma of having my eyeballs touched. It wasn’t until I noticed that my knitting was blurry that I realized they’d done something, and when I went back in the exam room I looked in the mirror and straight into my soul. I looked like I was tweaking on meth. But then according to this article, I was hot, so go figure.
I was given a clean bill of eyeball health and then I wound up wearing sunglasses for a little while, maybe an hour. Mostly, though, the world appeared to have slightly harder edges. Something was different about the perspective; objects were where they were supposed to be but I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything had been taken away and then put back a little wrong.
It all looked like how I’ve been feeling recently. I spent months curled in my own head and only recently have I had the chance to crawl out; now everything is different.
