Was Blind, But Now I See.

I got glasses last weekend. After weeks of leaning across aisles to whisper to classmates; "can you read that!?" months of feeling like a dolt because I couldn't seem to figure out the street number intervals in Provo, and years of going to bed with a splitting headache any time I watched a movie, I finally went in for an eye exam.

The ophthalmologist [gotta love that silent "l"] made sure I still knew the alphabet, flicked dozens of corrections in front of my face for several minutes--changing everything from the aspect ratio to the contrast, resolution, angle and skew of my world [made me a little loopy, actually] and then, with obvious relish, led me to a big bay window overlooking the South face of Mount Timponogos. "This is what you've been missing."

My prescription is a mild one--a gentle correction of a slight off-roundness of the cornea--but it has made an astonishing, and invigorating, difference.

The biggest change I've noticed is the heightened contrast my glasses provide. Though, logically, I know the amount of light spattering my cornea is the same as it ever was, the world seems a brighter...and a darker...place. The bark on young trees seems to split and peel one layer at a time, and the resulting creases mature to black crackled gouges in the trunks of older ones. Approaching headlights have contracted to piercing pin-points in an almost velvety blackness. My favorite red patent Mary Janes leave prints of a delicate flowering vine when I walk in new snow.

The sudden sharpening of a world I didn't realize was blurred has left me probing other areas of life; testing my focus, squinting at distant decisions in the past and future, wondering what a little "vision" correction might change.