Cataract flaws

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Over the years, your body becomes a historical document, in which certain moments are memorialized in scar tissue, visible or not. So does the brain. The brain memorializes moments of trauma in scars you can’t see, as well as other moments like giving birth or falling in love, which are one and the same when it comes to your child.

I ponder the phrase “cataract flaws.” I have cataracts on both eyes, but they’re not yet ripe. When they are ripe, they will be removed, one at a time, by a cataract surgeon who says they will not ripen on the same schedule, but rather, each on its own.

But then I realize I didn’t see cataract flaws; it was character flaws. There’s another doctor for that. I met her for two minutes yesterday (perhaps a few seconds more) and doubt she will win the Empath of the Year award.

But there is beauty, too. Consider the snow crystal or the monarch butterfly. Each one-of-a-kind. Consider your breath or your fingertips. I did not. I did not consider them. I saw type fly past screens, but missed the forest and the trees, leapt continents and constellations at the speed of consonants, but missed much of what is right with the world. Birds soaring skyward, plants poking through earth, buds stretching toward sun.

Once I felt like I had been thrown from a plane. Then it felt like trying to piece together any remnants of the person I was before I was thrown out of the plane. And then? It kept feeling that way. But I hadn’t been thrown from a plane. I’d been crushed in a car.

There were a few other problems, too. Like the phone weighed two hundred pounds. So did my right hand. My left hand weighed slightly less. But somehow there remained a spark of me in me which I fanned into flame because no one else could. That spark hatched this stack.