Nearsighted

I'm nearsighted enough that it's illegal for me to drive without my glasses. I can't make out the titles on my bookshelves from more than about a foot away.

At Christmas, though, I like to take the glasses off for a minute while looking at a decorated tree; the little light bulbs become indistinct rounds of fuzzy color, bleeding into the blurred mass of what used to be individual green needles. In a way, it’s far more beautiful than the crisp, clear image I see when I put my glasses back on; it has an air of magic. It’s the same with stars. With glasses, they appear to be the tiny pinpricks of light that they are, but if I take my glasses off, they appear bigger as each bit of light expands in blurriness.

Inevitably, though, I put my glasses back on. I suspect it’s not good for my eyes to be straining to bring things into focus, and there is so much that I don’t see with my glasses off – stars might appear larger, but fewer of them are visible to me; lights might be prettier when they’re fuzzy, but I can’t make out the ornaments I’ve collected over a lifetime, and the beauty of the tree itself is diminished. Besides all that, the blurred image is a false one; the stars aren't really any bigger.

As I sat writing in a local coffee shop one night, I had my glasses off; I don’t need them for reading or writing. At one point, I sat back and looked around. My glasses sat on the table as I observed the out-of-focus room and the street beyond the windows, the lights outside expanded and blurred, and I found it beautiful. But then I started thinking... and this is what I wrote:

Nearsighted

I take off my glasses,

and instantly the world changes.

The face across the table –

the cup of chai half a foot away –

begin the transformation

to blurry indistinction.

The lights in the night bloom

to fuzzy orbs twice their size

as the world transcends

into an ever-increasing impressionism – 

a beautiful flurry of color and light and dark.

There’s allurement in the half-truths

of how things really are;

a magic in the bleary stars.

It calls and we answer –

beckons, and we come.

And yet –

          and yet –