The doctor was kind to me. In a professional way. He asked me how my eyesight had been since my last eye examination and how I saw the world now. His old-fashioned courtesy was like coffee with cinnamon, accompanied by dark chocolate and orange. It added both flavour and comfort. After every professional question, he shared some reassuring observation about me. It was as if he knew I was worried that age was weakening my eyes. He hurried to reassure me that my green eyes were ageing beautifully. He explained that near and far are relative concepts and that it does not really matter how things are in reality. What matters is how we perceive them through our senses.
The doctor kept replacing one pair of lenses with another, peering into my eyes through a magnifying lens, shining a bright light into them, and reporting that everything was perfectly fine. "Your eyes are not ill," he said. "They are simply tired."
With every new pair of lenses, something inside me changed. Something adjusted me to another time and another space. It connected me with my childhood and with absolute freedom. My eyes sparkled, and my pupils widened at the touch of innocence. They filled with flying kites, balloons, butterflies and children's smiles. Somewhere in the air floated the excitement of a first kiss and the promise to remain faithful to one another.
The next pair of lenses was filled with love and desire. There you were—the one who had stolen my dreams and followed me through every thought and every inspiration. There was the place vibrating at your own frequency. There was your gaze, your touch, the air filled with unshared kisses. There were the fragments of my fragile vulnerability and my pride, the only things left behind after you. There was my small brave heart beating with the rhythm of hope and promise.
The doctor hurried to replace the lenses again. This time they magnified the world before me until everything appeared immense, as though I were peering into another reality where everything was gigantic, exaggerated, yet profoundly real. It was a world overflowing with love and warmth. It was so tender, so gentle and so honest that my eyes filled with tears, overwhelmed by emotion and lost inspiration.
Then the magician-doctor continued offering me new colours and new dimensions. The next pair of lenses transformed the space before me into a small crystal sphere resting in the palm of my hand. The crystal sphere spun slowly in every direction, and inside it I could see dark matter. There lay all the sorrow I had gathered over the years. Sadness for missed moments, for the lack of courage to reach out first, for everything I might have become. Inside that little crystal sphere lived my pain, my suffering, my despair and my fear. The fear that every step I took made me even more fragile, more vulnerable, more exposed to the end. Towards the end, where the sphere overflowed with blackness and scattered golden stars. Frightened by the overwhelming meaning of that vision, I turned to the magician-doctor and asked him to change the lenses.
And he gladly fulfilled my wish because it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to determine what exactly was wrong with my eyesight.
"Doctor," I asked, "what I see through these little lenses you place before my eyes—is it real, or is it only an effect of the light?"
He blinked, puzzled and bewildered, and, just to be safe, put a few eye drops into my eyes.
At the end of the examination, the doctor told me that my eyes were in perfect health and that he would have been far more concerned if I had been able to see only the black letters and numbers on the screen before me. His advice was that if one day I ever doubted my eyesight again, I should simply think of something and believe in it. If you believe in something, he said, it acquires magical power. And if you believe in it every day, you gradually become one with that magical power. Because you become the magic in which someone else will one day begin to believe. And then everything will be well.
The doctor was kind to me. The chocolate with orange had been eaten. The cinnamon coffee had been finished. My tired green eyes continued to reflect the seasons in which they had been filled with laughter, suffering and love.
(Elena S. Lyubenova)
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