Why I Don't Wear My Glasses

I have to put them on occasionally -- to work at my computer, to read subtitles at the movies. I'm fine to drive without them, and I don't need them to read, so most of the time, my life proceeds in a gauzy haze, soft around the edges. Substituting rose-colored glasses for real ones.

The world is too sharp and unpleasant with them on, when I can see so clearly all the dust on the bookshelves, the little mosquito bodies on the window ledge. When I look at myself, I seem thinner in 20/20, but my skin looks much worse, like I have a hangover. And I can't figure out why my hair looks frizzier when it's not blurry. Shouldn't it be the other way around? The only thing I've found that improves with clarity is a cloudless, moonless night sky. Stars should be pricked against the dark, cut and polished along cosmic cleavage planes, faceted. Properly magnificent.

But I'd still miss the soft fuzzy darkness of my everyday nights, the milky lights running together. The friendly sky that's been my companion for so long.

I read this poem once about a woman glimpsing a burst of white flowers along an otherwise barren roadside, the hope she felt as she passed in her car, to think that even in desolate abandoned nothing, there can be beauty, springing up. But when she mentioned the incident to her husband, who had been driving, he informed her that the flowers had been a bunch of dirty diapers somebody had thrown out.

I wonder what I'll miss today, with my glasses tucked in my purse. And I wonder what I won't miss at all.