There's something on your face...

As a kid, I wanted to have glasses. I guess you always want what the other kids have, and I thought they were a neat-looking accessory that made you smart and sometimes popular. I would spend time wistfully trying them on at street vendors’ tables.

A couple of years ago, I left work in the evening feeling headachy, and noticed that the world looked blurry. I chalked it up to another day in front of the computer, and that blurry feeling you can get in Midtown. But it was something else. By this year, I couldn’t read signs in the subway from across the platform. And a couple of months ago, while watching a movie with my brother, I couldn’t read the subtitles, just from a few yards away in the living room. He had to tell me what they were saying, as if I were an old lady. And need I mention, the entire summer in Rome, all those ceiling frescoes I was lovingly staring up at probably were not really as Impressionistic as they appeared to me. I could have seen the city even better, it turns out.

Right now, my vision is fine, if just a narrowly defined bit of it. Everywhere I look, my gaze is framed by two blurry rectangles. Inside the rectangles, everything is crystal clear. Outside, the world looks like it’s trying to catch up, moving in a swampy haze.

Mom took me to her eye doctor in August. The doctor dimmed the lights, covered one of my eyes and told me to read the middle line of letters. “Okay, the first one is an S.” “That’s an S?” Exclaimed Mom. It wasn’t a Z or an N either. A similar scene followed with virtually every letter. I was so frustrated that I started to cry. The tears actually served as lenses, magnifying the images a bit, so I was able to read a little a better. “You’re definitely nearsighted,” pronounced the doctor. “Could it be that six years in front of a computer did this to me?” I asked. “Nothing you did or can do will affect your vision,” he replied. “Is it just my destiny?” I wiped my eyes.

To me, people with glasses seem to demand a more gentle treatment. I view them the same way I would a pregnant woman, or someone in a wheelchair. So now I get to look all intellectual, demand a little extra special care, and -what I’ve always found sexy when guys have done it to me- take off my glasses when I start to kiss a boy. But then again, boys don’t make passes at…..