May 2, 2023

the optometry lesson

“No squinting,” said Dr. Wich, when a matrix of letters appeared on the screen 
twenty feet from where I sat, monocled. The old muscle, the one I’d flexed exuberantly
for elementary spelling tests and college applications, the one always ready to impress
the judges, had girded itself as usual. But the weak eye, divorced briefly from its neighbor,
failed to tell the difference between Os and Ps. I made desperate stabs at the line as if 
flinging a spear toward a battlefield frothed with enemies, but each time, the tip fell short,
my aim blurred and blunted. I felt betrayed, as I have at each of my body’s mutinies,
and when the doctor said, “You shouldn’t be working so hard,” I heard it as a teacher’s
disapproval. But then he flipped a dial and the shapes emerged and it was disapproval’s
opposite—tenderness—and I cried out, clear-throated, at everything I saw.