Farsighted By Laura J. Oliver

I was kind of vain about my eyesight for a long time. (I’m currently vain about my sense of balance. I can stand on one leg with my eyes closed.) I know, I know; I can’t believe it either. The vanity part, not the balance part.

I didn’t need glasses as a child and could see with 20/20 accuracy for decades. Then, one summer evening, I realized I was holding novels further away when I read and that the print looked fuzzy long before I was ready to fall asleep.

My optometrist said, “Yep, at around 40, the eyeball changes shape, and nearly everyone becomes a bit farsighted.” Farsighted means you can’t see things that are close up.

You’re probably thinking the eye of a sewing needle, the microscopic print on a prescription bottle, but I’m thinking mistakes, opportunities, and change.

Doctor, can you fix that, please?

“I see,” I responded, then laughed because I clearly didn’t see. And then it became a thing. I couldn’t stop saying it. No matter what he said, I’d automatically respond, “I see.”

When you are a writer, you hear in metaphor. It’s just how it is. You are watching the moment you are in as you are living it.

Doctor, can you fix that, please?

Because that predilection is epidemic now, with the advent of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. It appears no one is asking, “How do I feel about what I’m experiencing,” but “what can I say about what I am experiencing?”

Eventually, I have eye surgery because although I think I see just fine, my new doctor assures me I could be seeing a lot better. He’s young, cute, and humorless—with big dark eyes and short black hair. And he’s right. I see better. As I leave my final post op appointment, my doctor tells me to fill a prescription for glasses to be used to finetune my depth perception. Instinctively I want to say my depth perception is fine, thanks. But it’s not. Rushing down the stairs I nearly miss the last step. And running with the dog at night, I misjudge the height of the curb obscured by unmown grass.

All my life I’ve assigned my feelings and motives to others which means so often what I have assumed about them was only a projection of my own fear and shortcomings. The age-old maxim is true: we don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Doctor, can you fix that, please?

Because Sally, my friend from the age of 10, is dying. Two years ago, I blew her off at a high school reunion. I hadn’t seen her in decades, but our lives had gone in very, very different directions and there were so many people I wanted to talk to more. She stood in the center of the room leaning on a cane with three feet on the bottom, and her expression was one of shock, almost vacuous or not entirely present. We spoke briefly. I complimented her hair, noting that she was wearing it in a style identical to when we met in elementary school—long and straight halfway down her back, only now it was white.

Somehow, it pleased her that I had noticed. Apparently, it was a purposeful bookending of time. But I was struggling to make conversation, so I moved away and talked to classmates who seemed more like me now, even though she’d flown (with a cane!) from Florida to Maryland for the event. Even though I’d met her the summer my parents divorced, and she filled an emptiness I could not name with laughter and overnights and days swimming and skiing on the river.

Her parents’ names were Adam and Eve and we thought that was so cool. They owned a grocery store, and she always had better things to eat at her house than I did at mine. Her mother put onions in her tuna fish, whereas my mother used pickles. Her father had a slot machine we could play with nickels out on their porch. We sewed matching dresses in 5^th grade with her mother’s help. They were white sailcloth shifts covered in orange dots the circumference of a drinking glass. No mistaking that we matched. No mistaking that we were best friends.

And I just heard by an indirect and circuitous route I can’t follow up on that she is in

Hospice. She never had children. Last I heard, she was not married. Fluid has collected around her heart—like unshed tears. Perhaps those are mine and I’m projecting again.

Because I want to tell her I’m sorry, and more than that, thank you.

We all suffer from attention blindness. Tell someone to watch a basketball game upon which they have bet a small fortune, in which the score is tied, 10 seconds from the buzzer, and they will simply not see a man in a gorilla suit walk past the bleachers.

Tell someone at a reunion that they may never see again a person with whom they shared years of joy, and they don’t see the opportunity in the moment to express genuine interest, affection, and gratitude. They completely miss the fact that loss is on the bench, ready to be called into the game.

Even though we are limited by both the atmosphere and the earth’s curvature to a sightline of only about three miles on the ground, when we look up, we can see the galaxy Andromeda, 2.5 million light years away. How is that possible? To see so far but to miss what’s right in front of me.

The eyes are second only to the brain in complexity. I would have thought the heart had that distinction. Who would have thought we can see halfway to heaven? I don’t know what to say about that, but I know what I feel.

If Sally is already there, I hope I get to see her again.