Love and First Sight(13)

“No, just born at the wrong time in history.”

“A lot of blind people feel that way, too,” I say. “Hundreds of years ago, most people were doing manual labor, like working farms or pulling plows or whatever. You didn’t need extremely clear vision for stuff like that. You could go a lifetime without realizing you couldn’t see as well as everyone else.”

“But now we are in the information age,” she fills in.

“Exactly. Which started with the printing press, and now our society is based on communicating by words and pictures. It’s called ‘the tyranny of the visual.’ Sorry, I didn’t mean to regurgitate everything from my seventh-grade History of Visual Impairment class.”

“No, not at all,” she says, and sounds like she means it.

“Although in the last couple years, technology has been making things a lot easier,” I add.

She guides me up to a painting, and we stop. Normally at this point, I would let go of a guide’s arm. But I don’t. Instead, I loop my hand through the wrist strap on my cane so I can touch the painting with that hand while my other one stays connected to Cecily.

And then I catch myself. Why am I still holding on to this girl’s arm? I’ve already reached point B.

So I let go as I examine the painting with my other hand.

Cecily describes the painting to me in between snaps of her camera. One of van Gogh’s many self-portraits, she explains. He looks gaunt and soulful. She says there are hints in his eyes of the depression that will eventually claim his life, when he committed suicide at age thirty-seven.

“It has a lot of oranges and reds in it,” she says. “But I guess you don’t know what those look like, huh?”

“Not so much.”

“Those are considered warm colors. So they’re like the heat of the sun or the smell of the fall.”

“Sorry,” I say. “That’s poetic, but it doesn’t help me.”

“Can you not even… like, imagine a color?” she asks.

I hear more visitors shuffle into the room, voices soft as they comment on the artwork.

“Even if I could, how would I know I’m imagining a color when I’ve never seen one before?” I ask. “It’s, like, how do you know that when you see red, it’s the same red as everyone else sees? Maybe what they call red looks to them like what you call blue? There’s no way of knowing if your experience of a certain color is the same.”

“But I can close my eyes and see a color in my mind. Can you not do that?”

I chuckle.

“What?” she asks.

“Let me put it this way: Try to imagine a color you’ve never seen before. Like, a brand-new color that was just invented and has never before existed. What would it look like?”

She is silent.

“Well?” I ask.

“You’re right,” she says. “It’s impossible.”

“That’s how it is for me. Except with all colors. And all two-dimensional shapes. And everything you see in these paintings. You have to understand that my mind developed differently because, unlike most blind people, I have never seen anything with my eyes.”

“You were completely blind from birth?”

“Right,” I say.

“So you’re trying to tell me you belong to a pretty exclusive club?” she says playfully.

“I’d show you the membership card, but you wouldn’t be able to read it. It’s written in braille.”

She laughs, but then says seriously, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“That you have to live that way. It must be so frustrating.”

If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s people feeling sorry for me.

“What do you mean?” I say, trying to limit the irritability creeping into my voice. “You think my experience of the world is less rich because I’m blind?”

“Well, you’re missing out on so many—”

“That’s sightist, Cecily. Assuming that blind people can’t have a full life because they don’t have eyesight. My sensory experience isn’t less than yours. It’s just different.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Why don’t you take your pictures so we can get out of here? I’ll go interview the guard to get some quotes for my article.”

“Want me to guide you back to him?”

“No, I remember the route.”





CHAPTER 6


After I get home from the museum, I go to my bedroom and plop down on the bed to listen to music. It’s the bedroom I grew up in before I went to the school for the blind. Other kids, I guess, have posters on their walls with photos of stuff they like to look at. Cecily’s probably has paintings. No, forget Cecily. She was rude to me. I don’t care what her room looks like.

When I was a kid, Mom helped me decorate my bedroom walls with scratch-and-sniff stickers. Each wall has its own category. The wall with my closet is sweet food (fruit, desserts, and the like), the wall with my desk is savory food, and the one by my bed is scents of nature.

In total, I have 187 different fragrances on the walls of my room. When I was a kid, I wished I had that many fingers so I could scratch them simultaneously and find out what all the scents in the world smelled like together. (As it turns out, I’m able to experience this by simply walking into Toano High School’s cafeteria.)