TIRED EYES

The doctor was nice to me. In a professional way. He was questioning me how my eyesight was since my last eye test and how I see the world now. His old-fashioned courtesy was like coffee with cinnamon, accompanied with dark chocolate and orange. It added taste and treatment. After every professional question he shared some comforting observation about me. It was as if he knew I was worried that my age was weakening my eyes. He hurried to comfort me that my green eyes were ageing beautifully. He explained to me that close and far away are relative concepts and that it does not really matter how things are in reality. What matters is how we feel them with our senses.

The doctor was replacing glasses by glasses, peering into my eyes with a magnifying glass, flashing with a special flashlight, and reporting that everything was alright with them. Your eyes are not sick, they are just tired. After each pair of glasses something was changing in me. Something was adjusting me to another time and space. It was making connections to my childhood and absolute freedom. My eyes were shining, and my pupils widened from the touch with innocence. It was full of flying kites, balloons, butterflies and children smiles. Somewhere in the air was the enthusiasm of the first kiss and the oath to be faithful to one another.

The next glasses were full of love and desire. It was you who stole my dreams and who chased me in all my thoughts and inspirations. There was the place that was vibrating at your frequency. There was the look, the touch, the air full of missed kisses. There were the pieces of my frail, hurt vulnerability and pride, the only thing left behind after you. There was my little brave heart that was beating at a frequency, close to promise and hope.

The doctor was in a hurry to change the glasses, and the new ones he was putting were enlarging the world in front of me to immense size, and I seemed to peep into another world where everything looked giant and huge, exaggerated, but real. It was full of love and warmth. It was so touching, gentle and frank that my eyes began to swell, overwhelmed with emotions and lost inspiration.

Then the magician doctor continued to offer me new colours and dimensions. And the new glasses turned the space in front of me into a little crystal ball that I held in my hand. And the crystal ball was spinning on my palm in all directions and I could see it was full of dark matter. There it was my all sorrow gathered over the years. Sadness about missed moments, lack of courage to reach out first, and to what I could have been. In the little crystal ball was my pain, suffering, despair, fear. The fear that every step taken makes me even more fragile and vulnerable, more open for the end. Towards the end where the ball was overflowing with black and golden stars on it. Frightened of the great sense of this picture, I turned to the magician doctor to change the glasses.

And he was fulfilling my desire because it was so difficult for him to decide exactly what was the problem with my eyesight. Doctor, what I see through those little glasses that you put on my eyes is this real or just a light effect, I asked him, and he blinked confused and bewildered, and just in case, he put in some eye drops.

At the end of the test, the doctor said my eyes were in perfect health and that he would be more concerned about me if I could only see the black letters and numbers on the screen in front of me. His advice was if one day I still have eye complaints and I am not sure if I can see well, to think of something and to believe in it. If you believe in it, it gets a magical power, and if you believe in it every day, you become one whole with the magical power. Because you are the magical power in which someone else will begin to believe. And then everything will be fine.

The doctor was nice to me. Chocolate with oranges was eaten. Cinnamon coffee was finished. My tired green eyes continued to reflect the seasons in which they were full of laughter, suffering, and love.

(Elena S. Lyubenova)