A sting. A swell. A white light.
“Easy,” Dr. Gray says, patting my arm. “Let them adjust.”
Warm tears bury their bodies in the pits of my ears. White floods the room, drowns everything. My lashes fight to pull the world in.
The bleached landscape sharpens into the curves of Dr. Gray’s face. Before, her wide face reminded me of an empty plain, but through the lenses, her lips are dewy, tucked into the slopes of her cheekbones. Same features, polished into a frightening perfection.
You can’t prepare for beauty after not seeing it for a long time. It’s a shock to the system. It’s what happens when we fall in love, why we stumble around and forget to feed the cat. Our brains are catching up with the new way the world exists.
“Do things look better?” Dr. Gray asks.
The clinic’s cabinets are pinched in colors. The overhead lights cast delicate webs. Each time I blink, a headache pulses like a fat fist behind my forehead. I can feel myself crying.
“Sorry,” I say, wiping my cheeks. “It’s beautiful.”
“Great.” Dr. Gray snaps off the light. Shadows flit like static in the darkened room. “Sit here while your eyes adjust to the lenses. Welcome to your new life.”
It was a sweaty spring morning when I learned of Optimize Optical. I was riding the downtown bus to my job in an insurance sales office. Across the aisle was an ad. In it, an aging pop star tossed a mirror over her shoulder. Don’t optimize how you look, the ad said. Optimize how you see.
I thought, What the hell does that mean? But I knew. I’d tried all the tricks the counselors and self-help cult leaders recommended: catalog the colors in a room, pause to breathe, make lists of what sparks your joy. None of it worked. Every sight ate my heart. Each blink felt like a stone ripping through my insides. The person I loved was still dead.
But a surgery to change how I saw the world? That could work. Maybe then it’d be easier to get up and put my feet on the floor. I’d toss out that yellow bottle of sleeping pills I’d been collecting in my nightstand. I’d take up yoga, stop thinking about what came after and enjoy what I had.
I called my work to say I was sick, then got off at the next stop.
In a windowless room, I answered questions from a fresh-faced scientist. He said the lenses were in the trial stage, that if I was approved and signed a waiver, I’d get the surgery for free.
“Low risk, high reward,” he added. “Why are you interested in the lenses?”
I had an answer prepared. I want to see the world’s potential. I’d practiced saying it while I walked from the bus stop. The world’s potential. I tried stressing different words. The WORLD’S potential. The world’s POTENTIAL.
What I said was: “I want to see something worth loving again.”
The interviewer set down his pencil, then picked it up again. The eraser left pieces of itself behind as he wrote, then rewrote my answer.
Later, Dr. Gray, with pale outstretched hands, said it was simple. “We take the optimized lens and embed it into your eye,” she said. “Do you have any questions?”
I thought about what questions my sister would ask. “Are there any side effects?”
“Minimal,” Dr. Gray said.
“What are they?”
I waited as Dr. Gray crossed the room, dropped flakes into the fish tank in the corner. If there were any fish inside, they were hiding.
“People see danger and sadness for a reason,” Dr. Gray said. She brushed her hands together, then returned to her seat. “You won’t see the world as it is.”
I looked at the fish tank. There were no fish, but the food was gone. “I’m fine with that,” I said.
After the surgery, I wait for my sister outside the clinic, my new eyes tender. Clipped roses shimmer with dew in the warm breath of the sun. A dog walker shoots me a smile that unbuttons my heart. Across the street, a man in a wheelchair lights a cigarette. The ember burns gold.
A woman steps from a car and approaches me. She is smiling, of course. Everyone since the operation is smiling. A person can interpret a smile out of anything. A grimace and a snarl have the same shape of teeth. How do we know which one is which?
“And?” the woman asks, as if we’re stranded in the middle of a sentence.
It takes me a moment to recognize my sister. I smash my nose into her shoulder to breathe her in. She pats me hesitantly. We don’t share the kind of sisterhood in which we breathe one another in. We’ve spent most of our lives exhaling one another out. “How did it go?” she asks.
“You look like an angel.”
“So it worked.”
As we walk to the car, I gasp at the pink sky.
“You look weird,” Sheila says.
“I’ve never seen beauty like this,” I say. Sheila raises an eyebrow but says nothing.