I Keep Circling Around Something But I Don't Know if I'm Getting Any Closer

I was thinking more about blurry stuff, about how everyone wants just a little bit in focus, that wouldn't be so bad, would it, since most of the picture would still look the way I like it? If only 1% was sharp, then everyone would be happy. I agree that 1% isn't very much. The difference between 34% and 35% of something is hardly worth mentioning. But when it's the difference between 1% and 0, I think that difference becomes enormous. It becomes, not the difference between something and a little less, but the difference between something and nothing.

And I was thinking about how comforting those blurry images feel to me. I don't ever look at them and try to resolve them. Do other people do that? There's no frustration for me, no sense that I'm missing anything. I go back to the story I was telling last year, about my lousy eyesight, and my dislike of glasses, and I think that maybe that story was truer than I knew. I had been starting to think that the story I was telling was just that, not a true explanation, but something that sounded good, something believable but not necessarily the real reason for this obsession of mine.

I've had lousy vision for nearly as long as I can remember. I got glasses in third grade, but I never liked to wear them. I took every excuse I could find to avoid wearing them. I got used to using the tools of the nearsighted -- color and shape and movement instead of line to identify people and places. Even when I'd grudgingly started to wear my glasses on a regular basis, there were always certain things I would never wear them for. I used to do theater and choir, but I couldn't perform in my glasses. My glasses were like an anchor to myself, specifically the parts of myself I most wanted to let go of. My glasses were like a distillation of my own perception of my social awkwardness. Like a little kid who closes her eyes when she doesn't want to be seen, somehow I always felt more exposed when I could see clearly.

And since I don't wear glasses to bed, all those memories of just before falling asleep or just after waking, those are memories of color and light, sound and movement, but always a blur.