Love and First Sight(37)

Once we get home, I go to my room and shut the door. I cry and punch things for hours. I break some stuff. I don’t even know what. Just random stuff.

The absurd part of all this, I realize, is that I am now so much worse off than I was before the operation. I had convinced myself I wouldn’t be one of those people who got depressed when the sight of the world wasn’t what I expected. But I went through everything, two surgeries, and I didn’t even get that far. I was blind two weeks ago, and I’m still blind now, but at least before I was relatively happy with my life. I was adjusting to a mainstream school, had friends, a possible cohosting gig, good grades. I had it all, really. And then I got this fantasy that I could have sight, that I should have sight, and it made me feel like what I had wasn’t enough anymore.

That’s why I had the operation.

And guess what? It didn’t work. I’m still blind. And it’s worse, too, a more unbearable blindness. Before, my blindness felt like nothing, and now I have this loud static in my brain that offers only distraction and pain.

Dad was right. I’m a different person now. The operation did change me. It changed the way I see my life, from the inside. Now I know I will never be happy as a blind person. Now that I have had a sample—not of full eyesight, per se, but of believing that it could be mine—and then had it ripped away from me, I will be forever stuck in this twilight world of dissatisfaction.

My phone buzzes intermittently. Just-checking-in-on-you texts from Cecily, Ion, Whitford, and Nick. But I don’t want them to know. I’m not ready for them to know. I’m not sure I’ll ever be.

I spend the rest of the day wallowing on the floor with my door locked, not even coming out for meals.





CHAPTER 18


When I wake up Saturday morning, I am immediately assaulted by insanity.

It’s like music, except with a thousand different instruments that are all out of tune. It’s like the taste of every food group at once, like the smell of all the cafeterias in the world.

Am I having a nervous breakdown? Am I dying?

And then I move my head, roll it to the side, and everything changes. Now it’s a completely different swirl of madness.

I blink.

And it all shutters for a second, shakes like an explosion inside my brain. I blink again, another explosion, like a single blow to a bass drum, like jumping into an ice-cold lake. I close my eyes, and the overload regresses, simplifies itself back to that pounding darkness I’ve experienced for the two days since the surgery.

I open my eyes, and the flood pours into me again, choking me with its power. I shudder, from my feet to my head, and it all changes again, shakes like an earthquake. I start to feel dizzy, and I fall on the floor, and my head gets lighter—this is it, I’m dying—and without warning I feel my stomach empty itself up through my throat. Vomit spills all over my face, and I recoil, which changes the world again. Then I’m coughing, and with each gasp, the torrent changes. I blink.

BOOM.

It breaks over me, a tsunami-level wave of sensory input.

I know it, deep down, below gut level, in the deepest region of my instinct.

These are colors.

I can see.

The colors shake and tremble, move in and out like a radio with a spinning dial. I retch again, bucking with the force from within. Compared with that pounding darkness I was experiencing, this is so much faster and louder and more stupefying. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced, a nonsequential mishmash of percolating aliveness.

The colors shimmer. They shift. They move.

I can see!

My eyes are working!

These are colors, and they are moving every time my head moves, and I can see them move, and I can see colors and movement!

“Mom!” I yell. “Help! Come quick! Moooooom!”

Within seconds, she bursts through the door. At the very moment I hear the sound of the door opening, there is a violent change in the colors, and seeing it causes me to heave once again.

“Oh my God, Will, what happened!?” she cries, her feet rushing toward me, the colors moving so wildly now that I close my eyes and fall backward. “Henry! Henry! HENRY!” she calls for my dad.

“No, Mom, it’s all right!” I say. “I can see! I can SEE!”

“Henry, call 911!”

“Listen, Mom!”

“Henry, get an ambulance! Something is wrong with Will! Oh my God, my poor baby, what is happening, what is that all over you?”

“No, Mom. Listen to me—”

“What is it—oh my God, Will, what happened?” says Dad, his voice going from loud to earsplitting.

Mom is hysterical, screaming from all directions at once. “Did you call an ambulance?” she yells.

“No, I—here, I will do it right now,” says Dad in a panicky voice I’ve never heard before.

“Dad!” I say. “Stop! I’m fine! I just threw up! That’s it.”

“What?” he asks, a little calmer.

“Look at me! I’m fine. It’s just puke. That’s all,” I say the words slowly, emphasizing each one, trying to get my parents to slow down and listen.

But my eyes are closed. I can’t let in the colors. They are too much. They overwhelm me; they’re drowning me.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” asks Dad.