Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(42)

The top half took after my hips, as Mom said, and I learned to keep water glasses at the twelve o’clock position of my plate, to lean forward when eating popcorn or anything sauce-laden, and that I would always have to brace my arm across my chest when going up and down the stairs. To reduce bounce and because it’s easy to lose track of your feet.

Oh, also, my ass. Who knows where that’s ended up, exactly. It’s made its own fabulous place in the world.

The summer before I moved here, Mom and I had laughed over the increase in my ungainly stumbles and butterfingers, chalking it up to nerves over moving so far away.

It seemed normal that I would spend the summer tripping and walking into walls, like my subconscious trying to say that I still needed my mom, or something.

When I got here in the late summer, I found out I had to take a driver’s test to get an Ohio driver’s license as I had accidentally let my Washington license expire. On the freeway just south of the university, with the officer from the DMV in my car, I got into an accident while changing lanes.

Thank God it was a sleepy, late Tuesday morning before classes were in session. I was going slow, too, because of a work zone. It still makes me so thankful that I get shaky to remember that no one was hurt. The officer was kind and perfect and talked me through breathing out my sobs.

I couldn’t tell them how it happened. At all.

My certainty that my lane was clear felt bone deep, and because it was a test, I was on alert. I had checked my mirrors, and my blind spots, and there was nothing there, except, there was.

A landscaping pickup truck with a huge neon green decal over the side.

I had stood in the shoulder of the freeway and looked at that huge green sticker on that big truck and I knew I hadn’t seen that truck. Then, there was this whoosh of knowledge that came over me, made me get chills even though it was August, and so hot and muggy on the shoulder of the freeway that we were all sweating through our clothes.

I hadn’t seen that truck.

I’d never been to the eye doctor. At all my physicals, when they do the thing where they make you look at the letters?

Twenty-twenty, every time.

I’d never been to the eye doctor, but then I ended up going to so many, that August and September, I’ve lost count.

Retinitis pigmentosa.

Now, it’s just December, and I lean against the cold window of the bus and watch brand-new snowflakes swirl in the icy breeze. We haven’t had a really good snow yet, one that’s left behind a lot of inches, and I’m looking forward to it because they’re rare in the Northwest.

I’ve been told it’s actually kind of a crapshoot that December will bring a bunch of snow to Ohio, but the natives keep telling me we’re due for a white Christmas, and so I’m hoping.

There are only a few little snowflakes now, but even a handful of snowflakes, spread out in the wind all over a big city, still means it’s snowing.

Snowfall.

Even though the vision I have left is twenty-twenty, my visual field has narrowed, and my night vision is grainy with little acuity and full of interlocking halos radiating from artificial light sources.

I can see, but I am told my diagnosis means I’m going blind.

It’s like how at first, when a snowflake finds its way to rest on the pointed top of a fence board, melting a little because it is all by itself, we say it is snowing, but everything in our neighborhood still looks the same.

The pointy boards of the fence still point, the bare trees zigzag their branches all across the pale sky, all the patio furniture we never bothered to bring in is still exposed on its lonely patio.

Then, three or four new snowflakes join their pioneer on the fence, and because they can huddle together for cold, they don’t melt. They can make a little cold spot for another three snowflakes, until there is a soft pile, like spilled sugar.

One snowflake at a time, the pointy boards of the fence grow soft, the branches of the trees round with drifts, the patio furniture disappears into white and indistinct humps and caves.

I draw a six-pointed snowflake in the fog of my breath on the bus window.

One snowflake at a time for the world you thought knew to transform.

Unrecognizable.

At first, it’s snowing, and then, while you aren’t looking, snowfall.

The world you knew is still there, but it’s hidden.

Campus and home have been enough, for me, this winter. I wrote to C, last night, curled in the dark, his words glowing under the glass of my screen.

He wants to know why I’m not getting out more. Why I’m always available to chat in the evenings. He isn’t, always, and then he’ll tell me about a concert I had vaguely heard about, or some community locavore dinner, or a movie.

Sometimes, Bob or one of my other lab colleagues will invite me out at the end of the day. I got a lot of invitations, at first. Which, actually, I’m surprised how many I turned down. I like bars. I like people. I like outdoor concerts and cookouts and trying new restaurants. Mom and I had a membership to all the museums in Seattle, the zoo even, just so we could go whenever we felt like it and see one thing.

Sometimes you just want to look at lemurs. Or one Monet. Or sit in a listening booth at the Experience Music Project and try to figure out Bob Dylan. Which is impossible, by the way.

Everyone has told me that there is a good museum here. C went to the Rothko exhibit, the Andy Warhol one, too, with the giant, silver, balloon clouds.