Blind Side

Being unable to remember was a big problem for me. But then, we’re so selective when the buffet cart of life wheels past. I mean, I don’t remember the vast majority of my life. Who does? We’re so intent on the next big thing. So many of the small things pass unnoticed. And they’re the things that count most. Or at least they adorn those things that matter and should be noted, so when we’re standing at the identity parade of our lives we might actually recognise ourselves.

The loss of potential memories at source is a death of sorts. A wilful input dementia that defies belief. We are Magpies of Meaning in this life of ours. Yet we starve ourselves of that very meaning. There has to be sense and there has to be reason in order to keep the madness of chaos at bay. That’s why we stick to the rules and keep our noses clean. Mostly we do. Most of us. Or at least some of us. I don’t know the numbers but I reckon someone keeps score and that score is also what counts and what matters. Making something of this life contributes to something far bigger than all of us. Something our mortal minds cannot comprehend. We’re ants in the hill doing the job we were made to do. Workers, soldiers and royalty. And where there’s soldiers there’s always a war. Soldiers ain’t about peace. They have a job to do and they’re never idle for long, much as it pains me to say it.

I don’t remember the accident or anything running up to it, so there’s a part of me that doesn’t think it ever happened. They say that’s how it goes and you’d think there’s comfort in that. Your mind shuts down the flim and the flam so your body can focus on survival. The recordings stop and you exist in the moment for once. But my life didn’t play out before my eyes, so it couldn’t have been my time. Unless of course I don’t remember that show. There are a lot of shows I don’t remember right up until I do remember them. That’s memory for you. A sporadic streaming service. The comeback kid of the senses. But some things you don’t want to come back. And some things you wish were never there in the first place.

There was a blank and then I woke up. Only I didn’t wake up. Not really I didn’t. On TV shows there’s this anxiety you experience when the screen doesn’t have an image on it. Directors play with that. They play with you, the viewer. You’re cheated of what you expect. But it goes deeper than that loss. This gaping blank loss has an endless capacity that whispers to you of death. The death of that expensive TV you only bought just a year or so ago. The death of you and all you love. Impermanence is the creeping spectre of life.

I awoke to a blank and foreboding darkness. An endless trickery that pulled me apart and exposed my insides. I wasn’t born blind and so I knew what I’d lost, whilst at the same time I had no clue. I hung suspended in a cruel facsimile of reality. Disembodied voices robbing me of my body and my identity. All that I’d decided was real in the life prior to my accident was become unreal. It was there, but now it was beyond my reach. Turns out that seeing really is believing and disbelief will undo a mind as effectively as a surgeon’s scalpel.

With no prospect of me tripping the light fantastic, I descended into a gloomy despondency that saw me depart my own shores in the dead of this night time. I didn’t want this life, I didn’t want to be this person and I certainly didn’t like the person I now was. They say that your other senses make up for the loss of a sense. My sense of entitlement jumped to the front of the queue and I was a horror of a human being. Maybe this was how I was all along. I knew I was being horrible but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered when I could no longer see anyone and I didn’t care whether they saw me or not. Why would I? The inequality of the situation wasn’t fair.

Then a miracle threatened to happen despite my undeserving behaviour. A doctor wanting to make a name for himself by getting in my head and fixing it. I don’t know how much time elapsed from my rude blank awakening and the doc arriving on his camel bearing gifts, but it may as well have been a lifetime. 

And to think I told him to go forth and multiply when he first met me. Untrusting soul that I was, I didn’t think for a moment that what was on offer could work. The prospect of restored sight was too good to be true in a world modified so it could no longer contain any worthwhile truths for me.

Some thoughts are seeds though, and this one grew inside me with a ferocity I did not know possible. I was fertile ground for the rescue the doctor suggested. He tapped into a secret well of hope. He was my fairy godmother and I wished for nothing else but the restoration of my sight. 

Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.

The surgery was pioneering. Which was to say no one had ever attempted it before. There were some ethical concerns that got side swept by my sightseeing ambitions. Talk of my being a cyborg was too fantastical for me to entertain at all seriously. An independent artificial intelligence moving in and sharing the meat house I dwelt in sounded far-fetched. I thought of it more as a smart TV with a camera I could use to see the outside world. I simplified the whole affair so that I could live with myself. Adapted so my sight would survive.

This then was another period that is lost to me. Once I was set on the restoration of my vision I lost a grip of all else. Now it was a case of waiting until I was whole again. So by the time they put me under for the Great Miracle of Sight, I’d been treading water for quite some time. Wishing my excuse of a life away so I could be born again. Whole once more. Ready, willing and able to face the world with a face that actually worked.

I can’t tell you how much I looked forward to joining the land of the seeing again. To belonging like I once did. The loss of my sight isolated me in ways that I cannot express. But let’s put it this way, we take far too much for granted until we’re having to sit on the loo to pee and wondering whether we’re getting all the flow in the bowl or pissing our pants in any case. 

That was my life in the dark. I was a mess and totally alone in a state where I could possibly wet myself at any moment and then and only then would these invisible ghosts manifest themselves to make complete both my humiliation and my isolation. Helping me after the fact and reminding me there was no help for what I now was.

The day after the operation I was visited by my saviour surgeon and he explained what was going to occur next. That I was not yet online and switching me on was going to be one hell of a ride. I heard him tapping at a keyboard and asked him what he was doing. Turned out that his laptop was synched with my head and so I asked him the obvious question; would he see what I saw?

People have tells. The doc’s was a pause and a quiet intake of breath. He didn’t issue a categorical denial that he was hacking into my visual systems and so I knew the truth of it from the outset. What he did say was that the interface between my brain and the visual equipment I’d been provided with by the good doctor would translate what I saw in a way that was unique to me. I nodded at that, and was reminded that the extensive upgrade to my head still hurt like a bastard. My take away from this was that we all see things differently, even if we see the same thing. That’s why there’s so much trouble and strife in this world of ours. We’re born in disagreement and fail ever to reach an accord.

The go live was interesting. I had learnt to accept the curse of living in interesting times, but nothing prepares you for the chaos that follows the leap from frying pan into fire. And my eyes were on fire. The pain was something else. I was a pioneer in pain and that pain was a warning I could not have heeded even had I understood it at the time.

You might’ve got by now that I’m a selfish kind of person. I make things about me. I was angry at being blind and in that anger there was me and only me. Now the pain that was tearing at my face became my world. Sending its message loud and clear; something wasn’t right.

I wasn’t right.

The doc couldn’t understand it. The feed to his laptop showed up fine. The hospital room and no doubt the ensuite toilet images of me peeing myself were crystal clear on his screen. A case of adjustment he told me. Just like we flip the world upside down from the way the eye sees it. Maybe new-borns find that easy because they don’t yet have the words to say that everything is upside down. Until I came to be this way I never really considered our plight when we first come into this world. Blank canvases with it all to play for. It’s a madness of sorts, but we have nothing to compare that madness with. At least I don’t think we do. If we did, then we’d lose out tiny little minds and everything after that would be a nightmare. I think about that a lot these days and I wonder whether the numb sugar coating we clothe ourselves in is a curse or a blessing. Whether the white lie that we all choose to be is for the best, or a travesty of what we might have been.

As the pain settled from a roar to a disgruntled rumble I began to see more clearly. The brutal transition into sight robbed me of any joy I might have experienced at having my vision restored. Just one more reason why I remained focused on myself and the world that I occupied. I say that I saw more clearly, but this was a matter of context. Everything was a blur. A watercolour painting left out in the rain, and a strange gloopy effect to movement as though a person was bleeding out from one space to another. Sometimes I’d think of my hospital room as a womb. Sunlight diffused through skin. Dwelling in an invisible liquid that threatened to suffocate but never carried out that threat.

There were glitches and bugs. My sight would drop off into darkness and I’d experience the sort of stomach flip and dizziness you do as the rollercoaster crests the ridge and freefalls to earth. I was terrified of landing in another dark place. The sense of pending loss was overwhelming. I didn’t want to go back to the blank at any cost.

The doc told me it was probably the software learning to sync with my blinking. Something so simple causing a machine to trip. I asked him why I had to blink at all and I was greeted with his trademark pause. This time he was candid. The blinking was for everyone else. I needed to fit in. If I didn’t blink then my social interactions would be awkward and at times dangerous even. Staring people out could end really badly. These portals to the soul were too intense to be left permanently open. Didn’t do to go against our maker’s grain. I didn’t say what I was thinking as the doc told me this; too late for that, doc. The box is open and I can feel things crawling into it. Things from the blank moving into a space they were never meant to occupy.

Turns out the initial intensity to my pain was a blessing of sorts. It masked the new reality of my situation and gave me time to adjust. Problem was, I didn’t know what I was adjusting to. I suppose at that point it was as simple as becoming accustomed to the basics. Acclimatising to the light, having been kept in the dark for so long. 

There was some relief back then, despite the numerous snags and problems the software encountered as it got to know me and my take on the world around me. There was comfort to linking the sounds of the nurses to the gloopy movement I was trying to make sense of. In seeing that movement I felt their presence in a way I could relate to. I was no longer imprisoned in the dark and smiling sweetly at my invisible gaolers.

Hope began to light my world back up and although I bathed constantly in frustration I trusted the doc when he repeatedly talked about incremental gains. That I was making progress and there would be moments when I took stock and at last realised how far I had come. At least he didn’t resort to cliches. Although I thought he might at times. Reckoned he was close to spouting a corker such as every great journey begins with a single step, but he must’ve thought better of it. Maybe my face hadn’t forgotten how to communicate, even with the lack of cues from those around me.

It's a strange thing, absence. I used to be a vivid dreamer, but when I lost my sight there were no more dreams. Maybe I didn’t remember them due to the chaos of the days that followed my accident. Now I’m not so sure. There are many things I am no longer so sure of.

One day, I think it was in the third week of my existence as a freakish cyborg, the doc came in with that laptop of his and said he wanted to try a few things to help stabilise the images I was attempting to process. He started with adjustments to settings that faded the light and then increased it again. Told me this would usually be automatic but it was worth blipping the throttle and clearing the pipes. I was getting to know the doc pretty well and I guessed there was more to these tests of his. An upgrade to the software or something like that. I had an itch where my eyeballs used to be. I’ve learnt to trust that itch. It’s something like a gut feeling, but from the machine part of me.

The doc dabbled with the lenses of my eyes and whatever he’d set in motion on that day was working, right up until the moment when it didn’t. I screamed as everything fell into sharp focus. I screamed and I ranted and then there were people running into the room. Pinning me to the bed as I struggled and cried out. 

And then I slept.

I no longer dream and I think that’s a good thing because my waking hours are a nightmare. I’ve learnt to mask the terror that threatens to undo me. It’s been like learning to walk again. Only I’m the only one that walks this way. There’s just me and then there’s them.

I thought I was dreaming. I wanted it all to be a dream. But there’s no waking from this. I’ve been given a gift of sight that was never meant for the likes of me, or any of us for that matter.

I tried to tell the doc what I was seeing but he didn’t understand. Wouldn’t understand. I told him that we must be seeing the same thing and so he turned the screen around to show me his incontrovertible and objective truth. And I looked from the screen to him and back again. I was seeing the same monstrosity in both cases. Where the doc’s face should have been there was a caricature of death instead. A decay that we hide in the ground or burn from the world. An ending that does not belong in the midst of our pretty narratives. 

Something silenced my rising protests. I like to think it was me, but I reckon it was the machine that has become a part of me. A machine that has learnt to work with the lies that we tell ourselves and the lies that we are. Interacting with all the dark idiots. Smiling sweetly and hiding in plain sight in the madness of decomposition. 

I’m a tree falling in a forest of the walking dead and there’s no one to hear my fall. I exist in a sea of decaying humanity and I am drowning in solitude. I am so utterly alone. No one will ever know me. I have no way of reaching out and connecting with anything other than the machine in my head. I am the ghost in this machine and I haunt myself in a darkness that goes far beyond the loss of sight.

This is the loss of everything.

This is hell.

Once, in a lifetime become myth, I feared the unknown.

Then I became the unknown.