By seventh grade my sight grew worse and refused to stabilize. Each morning I woke up to a new level of diminished vision and the lessened expectations that went with it. My world seemed to be getting smaller, like the old science-fiction movies in which the heroes are trapped between two walls closing in on them. Sometimes I thought it would have been better if it had happened all at once, the violent bang of a door slamming, versus the maddeningly slow squeak as a breeze puffs it shut.
I had been walking to the school bus stop for a year. It was as familiar to me as my bedroom. I knew how the pavement contrasted with the grass and shrubs. I knew the smooth dark sections, newly paved; the lighter bleached places; and the places where the potholes were. I knew all the curves and the slopes uphill and downhill. But my view of the world was changing so fast. It was strange having such a familiar place suddenly become scary and foreign; dim, dark shapes twisted and quivered at the edge of my vision. Nothing I saw was real and, as my vision flickered, I imagined monsters with scaly bodies and bulging eyes waiting just out of view, blending in with the knee-high shrubs on the side of the road. I’d turn my head quickly, trying to see them square on, but they’d creep deftly back to the periphery, transforming into flickers once again. So I’d give up and walk quickly, concentrating on the pavement, hoping that if I kept my sight on the road and blocked the monsters out of my mind, they’d stay frozen in the grass and shrubs. Before, sight had protected me like a warrior’s amulet, but now I was easy prey and they were all moving in on me. Each day as I walked to the bus I braced myself, tightening my muscles for their attack.
During school it became harder for me not to notice the increasing differences between myself and other normal kids. After recess my eyes needed at least twenty minutes to adjust to the inside light of the classroom. I felt foolish waiting at the doorway, answering countless questions about why I was standing there. I got good at making up bizarre excuses. Sometimes I’d tell classmates that I was in big trouble and had to meet the principal. Other times I’d say that I was waiting for a pizza delivery.
When I sat in class, using my monocular in the front row, I noticed the letters on the blackboard becoming more and more distant, and the print in textbooks melting away like an ice cube squeezed in my hand. I was forced to use large print books that were more than twice the size of my old books and spanned many volumes. I carried them around in a backpack along with my thick reading glasses, monocular, and magnifying glass.
By now, I had only sketchy peripheral sight; I had to look at the ceiling in order to see straight ahead. I was embarrassed when Mitch, a bully in my class, looked at the ceiling, then back at me, and said, “What are you lookin’ at, googly eyes?” In the morning, small hazy shapes hovered in my field of vision and sometimes even expanded to consume my entire field. It was like peering through a translucent glass shower door. When pieces of vision broke away, the brain filled in the gaps with tiny objects. The effect was like a weird fun house with objects twisting and shaking in all directions. Sometimes, the blackboard seemed to shake so violently in front of me that I became dizzy and had to close my eyes. Usually by afternoon my vision grew clearer but, eventually, it would not improve as the day progressed.
Although my vision was disappearing quickly, I was not consumed by the loss itself, but instead was fixated on all the things my friends could do so easily. I desperately focused on trying to keep up with my sighted friends, many of whom played organized sports. Sports like basketball had so many precise rules: when to dribble, when to pass, three seconds in the lane, shooting at a tiny round net. The rules were so confining, I couldn’t excel, and instead found myself drifting to a group of kids that had no interest in organized sports. Their games had no rules, or we’d make them up as we went along. Some of the games were riskier and more adventurous than the ones I had given up, but being included was more important than the fear of getting hurt.
Each morning, before the school bell rang, we were corralled into the cafeteria while teachers patrolled the halls, making sure no students escaped. I’d crouch down beside the cafeteria door leading into the hallway, with a scraggly pack of boys. Ted would give the signal, and all together we’d lope down the hallway in the opposite direction of the on-duty teacher. Nine times out of ten a teacher would give chase and we’d zigzag through the halls, the teacher right behind us. On one chase, I misjudged the turns and ran smack into a concrete wall. The teacher paused for a moment, watching my crumpled form on the ground, then hurried off after the other boys. I was blown away in disbelief. He hadn’t picked me up roughly and hauled me to the office to fill out a pink slip like the others. He hadn’t even indicated that he’d be back for me. I was an insignificant lump on the ground, not even worthy of a lousy detention or an interim report to my parents. His response spawned in me a goal: to elevate myself to the rank of serious offender.
Sometimes my friends and I would gather in a large empty janitor’s room. Mitch, the self-appointed leader of the gang, would always have a few ideas to pass the time. “When I say the word, we’ll throw our milk containers through the library door. Aim for Yoda.” Yoda was our plump, round librarian. Or he’d say, “We’ll take these muffins and stuff them inside the guitars in the music room.” One day he turned to me. “Blindenheimer, everyone in this room has been in a fight. You’re the only one who hasn’t. How come? Today’s the day you get into a fight . . . or you fight me.” I actually stepped back, thinking for a moment that I could make it through the door and back under the scrutinizing eye of the hallway monitor, but then I realized how impossible that would be. “How ’bout at lunch?” I suggested, my heart pumping adrenaline into every corner of my body. Maybe I could find a sixth grader, I thought.
“How ’bout now,” he replied challengingly. I peered around the room. Ted was at least a foot taller than me, and the other kids had talked about him having a beard and mustache. To his right was Mike. I had rumbled with him once on the field during recess. His forearms bulged. Even Mitch didn’t mess with him. I eliminated each of the other kids in the room. Finally, my eyes focused on Chuck. He was taller than me and much bigger, but the others called him “baby fat.” Sometimes in the hallway, Chuck would crouch down and pop up into my field of vision. He’d lean his face close up to mine, so he was sure I could see him. Then he’d widen his eyes and roll them around in his head and crane his neck up toward the ceiling. I didn’t like him much and, besides, he was the only kid in the room I had a chance of taking. My eyes were pointed up at the ceiling, disguising whom I had focused on. “I choose . . . Chuck,” I shouted, lowering my head and rushing at him. Chuck had a large head, large face, and bright red hair, which made his face easy to spot. My fist connected, and I felt Chuck’s face, under my fist, squish back wetly. His head bounced hollowly off the wall. It made me a little sick, thinking about that squishing sensation and the hollow thunk of his head, so I was actually a little glad when Chuck hit me back and I felt my own lip squish back against my teeth. After that, we locked arms and circled around each other. “Look at the two faggots, too scared even to hit each other,” I heard Mitch sneer. I was relieved when I heard the bell ring, and we had to disperse. All that day I told friends about the fight. Ted overheard me once. “That wasn’t no fight,” he scoffed. “That was just two sissies slapping each other.” Still, I couldn’t get the sensation of my fist against his face out of my brain, both sickening and a little exhilarating.
Ever since I came close to colliding a friend’s dirt bike into a moving car that happened to be driven by my mother, my parents began restricting certain activities. But no matter how many times they said no to this and no to that, more untapped dangers awaited, just around the corner. There were caves to slither through, unfinished houses to explore, boulders to jump off, and cliffs to climb. At the Devil’s Glen, a fast-flowing river running between high granite rocks, we swam and jumped off the walls. I stood with my friends forty feet over the water on a protrusion of rock. Each dared the other to be the first to jump. None would venture first. I looked down; I could see the sunlit rocky ledge close to me drifting into empty blackness. I knew that there was a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot opening where it was safe to jump. Beyond that, rocks lurked only several feet beneath the surface. I took a stick and began to point toward the water. “Right there?” I’d ask nervously.
“No!” my friend Chris replied even more nervously. A few times I even pointed to areas I knew very well were full of rocks, just to hear what Chris would say. “No,” he said urgently. I pointed the stick a foot to the right. “More forward,” Chris told me. By pointing and repointing, I figured out the direction of the safe area. Then, with a deep breath and clenched teeth, I leaped off the ledge, forty feet of endless falling into the unknown, and then finally splashing into the water. I landed at the edge of the opening and touched my foot against an underwater rock. A little shaken, I laughed to my friends that I had found a rock they couldn’t even see.
Mitch sometimes came to the Glen, but he’d always make excuses for not jumping off the rocks. “Come on Mitch, jump in,” Chris would say.
“Can’t you see I’m busy smoking a cigarette?” he’d reply. “Maybe later.” Over the weeks I began to notice how scared Mitch was of heights. He’d stand at the edge and I’d hear his breaths exhale a tiny bit faster and almost imperceptible groaning sounds escape from his mouth. Then, he’d walk back to a boulder and sit down. “You’re scared. Just admit it,” Chris would say.
“Yeah, scared of bloodying up your fat head,” Mitch would retort. Once, I stood on the edge ready to jump and Mitch scrambled down beside me. “Gonna jump today?” I asked.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. If your blind ass can do it, I know I can!”
“Oh, yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. But I knew he was bluffing.
I looked down at the abyss and thought of all the times Mitch had popped me for stupid reasons; the time he had punched me in the face because he said I had sprayed spit on his pizza, the time he had knocked the wind out of me for tripping him by mistake with my cane. “Today’s your day,” I said.
I grabbed his arm and leaped off the ledge in the direction of the open water, listening as Mitch let out a terrifying cry. When I splashed into the water far below, with Mitch still in swan dive position just above me, I already felt guilty and hoped he wasn’t really hurt. I broke away underwater and attempted an escape, but when I crawled up onto the bank, I knew Mitch was just fine, because his fast-bruising fists were there to greet me.
Near my house, a short hike through the woods, was a large network of black, murky swamps. At the edge was a broken-down dock on which I would fish for hours in the summer months. Somebody’s old aluminum flat-bottom boat was tied to the end, and often I’d slip away in it for a little adventure. I’d glide through the black, impenetrable water. The head of the boat would cut through a layer of algae and decomposing leaves, creating a trail of open water behind. I could look back and see the layer of scum come together again, cutting off my path home. I tested myself by paddling farther and farther into the narrow channels, eventually learning to maneuver through the confusing maze. I used the familiar patches of sunlight blanketing the water and the gnarled patterns of oak trunks to guide me. Sometimes I got so lost that I was on the verge of panic, but always managed to find my way out. I enjoyed feeling responsible for my own destiny, even if it was scary. Occasionally I glided into a huge sticky spiderweb hanging above the water, and sometimes into a fallen rotten tree, with its mossy tentacles creeping across my face. Once, I almost glided into a large copperhead hanging from a limb in front of me. The reddish-brown color of the snake came into focus only a couple of inches from my face. I threw my body against the metal deck, my heart nearly exploding out of my chest.
Fishing on the end of the dock, I’d purposely scare myself by imagining my body splashing through the thick layer of scum and into the murky warm water filled with striking snakes, eels, and other creatures much worse. I had been listening to a book on tape entitled The World’s Most Dangerous Animals, and had just finished the chapter entitled, “Sea Crocs, the Savage Man-eater.” I peered down at the water, having a hard time convincing myself that the dark slimy tree stumps protruding from the surface weren’t the scaly heads of sea crocs.
Sometimes, my friends would fish at the dock too. When I shared the end of the dock with Mitch, I was always a little jumpy, afraid to turn my back.
“I bet there are a lot of eels and snakes under there,” Mitch said, looking at the water and then at me.
One day Mitch snagged his lure on an underwater root, and the line snapped. Without a word, he began tearing through my tackle box, looking for another lure. I hated the thought of Mitch’s dirty fingers, stained with tobacco, rummaging through my tackle box. “Get out of there,” I said.
I heard his breath as he looked up at me. “You mean to tell me you’re not gonna share with your good buddy, Mitch?” he said.
“Get your grubby fingers out of my tackle box and then I’ll decide,” I replied, but I don’t think this was the response Mitch had been looking for, because I heard his bare feet thudding toward me and felt his sweaty body plowing into me, pushing me back toward the edge. I fell back, landing on the edge of the dock. My right shoulder hung over the edge, with Mitch’s slick flesh on top of me. I could feel his arms digging under my side, trying to pry my body up and over, but it went rigid with fear. I thought of the loud splash my body would make, the first slimy touch of a sea croc as it swam by for a trial run, and finally the razor teeth sinking into my leg. The thought of the teeth was enough. It gave me the energy for one last thrust. I arched my body up and felt Mitch sliding over me. His body jerked and writhed as he snatched for something to grab. Lying on my back on the dock, I heard the splash. He thrashed around, emitting a shrill whimper. I didn’t wait to learn whether a sea croc had seized hold of his meaty leg, so I scurried furiously down the dock to safety.
A few days later I shuffled down the dock to go fishing. I had a cooler in one hand and a fishing pole in the other. Although I rubbed my eyes repeatedly, I could not clear the shapes that floated in my vision. Halfway down the dock my field of vision shook and I actually saw the wooden planks of the dock moving in two directions. I chose the dock to the left and as my foot dangled in emptiness, I knew I had made the wrong decision. My arms flailed for something, anything to grab, but there was only air. As I tumbled headlong into unknown space, frantic thoughts flashed through my mind. I envisioned myself splitting my head on a rock, stabbing myself on a jagged stump, or worse, much worse, plunging into the murky blackness and into the snapping swirl of hungry, man-eating predators. Thick water swallowed me up, and I choked for breath. My mouth emitted short high whimpers of fear as I thrashed around, feeling for the post of the dock. If there were sea crocs in the vicinity, they surely would have been on me with the noise I was creating. My arm banged against the wooden post, and I snatched it and shimmied my way up and back onto the dock. Then, I sat there shaking and surveying my scrapes and bruises that I was beginning to feel. Hundreds of splinters were buried in my hands and forearms, and I pulled them out with my teeth. As I untangled myself from my fishing line that had somehow wrapped around my body, I felt so stupid. Mitch, the toughest bully in school, hadn’t been able to throw me in, but I had managed to carry it out perfectly on my own. “I could have killed myself,” I repeated, until the realization sank in. I didn’t feel like fishing anymore, and I was too scared to walk back down the dock, so I crawled on my knees, embarrassed and scared.
As my world darkened, it seemed as though my mother’s did too. Ever since we had moved back from Hong Kong, her hard shell began to show more and more cracks. Her moods ebbed and flowed by some mysterious, unpredictable cycle. For days she bubbled over with outpourings of affection, laughed and told stories, and woke up early to make me pancakes and drive me to school. In these times, she was filled with pent-up energy, constantly vacuuming, mopping, and dusting. On her cleaning spurts, she organized Eddi and me into our own little cleaning brigade and ordered us to scrub the bathrooms and weed the garden. On her inspection, she would only accept spotless work. Then on other days she would go into her room, close the door, and sleep all day long, sometimes only getting out of bed to get a bowl of soup. She just lay quietly in her dark room, curled up in a ball. When I came in to talk to her, she scared me by talking about her own death. “If anything were ever to happen to me,” she said, “I want you children to have all the things I have collected. If your father marries again, I don’t want some young floozy to get any of it.”
“Mom,” I interrupted, “stop talking like that. You’ve got a whole future ahead of you.” But she must have forgotten her father’s advice to “look straight ahead,” because it was as though her eyes saw through a rearview mirror to the color and adventure she had left behind in Hong Kong. “And I don’t want to be buried, I want to be cremated and have my ashes scattered over the South China Sea.”
In the physical world outside my home, my dad had always excelled: he had won the student/athlete award in high school, had been the honor man out of six hundred other Marines in officer’s candidate school, and had recently become the head of human resources for a large Wall Street firm. Every challenge he set his mind to, he was the best and the brightest, so why wasn’t he the best at bringing my mother happiness? Maybe the responsibility rested on me. Sometimes I would climb from our second-floor balcony and sit on the steep roof for hours. I wanted to rescue her, to sweep her up in my arms and carry her back through time to her brilliant past. Beyond that impossibility, I didn’t know what to do. I tried to keep my room very clean, to make my bed every morning and to fold and put my laundry away, but in her solitude she didn’t notice.
Maybe, I thought, it was this place that made her so sad, with my father off in the world achieving, leaving her alone in our big house on the hill, filled with the prized furniture and artifacts she had brought back from her travels to India, Pakistan, Korea, and Thailand. Our house was an Asian museum. My sixth grade class had even taken a field trip to my house. At the entranceway my classmates had replaced sneakers with silk Chinese slippers and gone on a tour. They gawked at the four-foot burnished Buddha on the fireplace hearth and at the bronze sculptures of tigers and elephants, the colorfully painted antique chests, the Indian pishwas and Tibetan prayer wheels. They jumped back when they saw greeting them at the top of the stairs the life-sized wooden replicas of a sea turtle, Komodo dragon, and a cobra fighting a mongoose. My mother was only forty-two years old, but perhaps, surrounded by these vivid reminders of her past, these glimpses into what she once was and what she might have been, my mother’s life began to feel like a tomb.
At Christmas, during one of her worst spells, she hadn’t emerged from her room all day, while the rest of the family opened presents in the living room. I was the first to hear her pattering steps as she came down the stairs and around the corner toward the living room. I jumped up and ran toward her. “Are you going to open presents with us?” I asked excitedly. She didn’t answer, but instead passed right by me and kicked her prized Chinese pot into the living room. It shattered with a loud explosion. Then she crumpled onto the floor, moaning and crying. My dad and brothers ran over and picked her up as she still fought and screamed, wrestled her into the back of our car, and took her to the emergency room. For the rest of the day I sat on the couch. Half the presents under the tree remained unopened, but they were the last thing on my mind. I was haunted by the vision of my mother’s shuffling body moving past me, and although I might have only imagined it, I thought I glimpsed her eyes, distant and ghostlike, staring past me, perhaps into that imaginary mirror. When she returned that evening under the sedation of medication, I was afraid that when I gathered up the courage to enter her room as she lay on the bed, she would look at me blankly and not know who I was.
When I was younger, I had held my monocular up to my right eye and stood ten feet away from a picture of my dad that hung in our living room. He stood proudly in his Princeton uniform with his number, sixty-two, emblazoned across his jersey and his leather football tucked under his arm. He stood with his chest out and his strong square jaw jutting out. He wore a short flattop, and his deep-set eyes commanded such strength. Then I focused the monocular on a picture of my mom. She was standing in front of the Taj Mahal on a trip to India. She wore a sari, a traditional Indian silk wrap, emerald green with dark gold gods and goddesses leaping and dancing across the material. She was tall and slender and although her face was thin, almost fragile, it radiated confidence, just like my father’s. I had stared at the two pictures for a long time, wondering if I would become more like him or more like her. It was so much easier to admire qualities of logic, strength, and power, than the chaos of emotion. I could follow his path by planning and working hard to accomplish big goals, but another, deeper part of me wanted to hang on to my mother’s creativity, her softness, her flair, but that also meant taking on her brooding side, her vulnerability, her fragile spirit, laid open to the damage of time. My parents’ personalities were polar opposites, and I wondered if I could take a little from each, my father’s pragmatism and optimism to keep me safe, and my mother’s restlessness to keep me dreaming.
On hot summer days before my freshman year, as my mother slept, I would sit at my window listening to the neighborhood kids below in the cul-de-sac, organizing pickup games of basketball. I could hear the hollow sound of the ball dribbling against the pavement and the convulsive wobble of the backboard. One-on-one basketball was one organized sport that I had clung to, even as my sight diminished. Like the ramp, my dad had painted the backboard at the end of my driveway a bright orange. With only one person on which to focus, versus five, I was a pretty good player. I took a serious pride in being the neighborhood one-on-one champion, even though the boys in my neighborhood were only in fifth and sixth grade, while I was in eighth. In the late spring, I practiced intensely, but throughout the summer, sensing the loss of my sight, I had been avoiding the court. Finally, sitting at my window, the heavy, stale boredom of the house overtook my anxiety, and I went down to shoot around. The outline of the backboard was no longer clear, only a faint illusory form almost indistinguishable from the green and brown forest behind it. Soon Scott, a younger boy who had never come close to beating me, challenged me to a game. My pride would not let me back out. Scott’s hazy form seemed to flit around me at will. Sometimes he was around me before I even knew it. I’d spot a little wiggle of movement and then hear the ball against the backboard and through the net. The one time that Scott didn’t steal the ball out of my hands, I charged toward the basket, but I wasn’t exactly sure I was moving in the right direction. I kept expecting Scott to dash up behind me and snatch the ball away, in fact I hoped he would, because when I looked up, frantically whipping my head around, the backboard was nowhere. Then I simply wanted the ball out of my hands. I guessed at a direction and threw the ball up wildly. It landed in the grass, probably miles from the backboard. Scott actually laughed in astonishment. When we were finished playing, I had lost, ten to zero. I was too shocked even to be angry. Scott threw his fist in the air repeating, “I can’t believe it. I’ve never beaten you!” I threw the ball to Scott and walked away in a daze. The victorious chants faded behind me. “Where you going? Hey, where you going?” Scott’s voice trailed off.
I had to escape. A new house was being constructed down the road and I had gone there a few times to think and be alone. I walked down the driveway and through the open door frame. The house was an empty shell. The workmen had left for the day and I stood inside completely alone. I walked through the empty rooms, feeling the cool plaster walls and the new glass windows recently installed. I could see the windows, thanks to the contrast between the light streaming through the glass and the dark wood window frame. I stepped back from one window, counting the paces before it drifted away, indistinct from the wall. Eight paces, only eight damn paces. A week ago I had seen it from eighteen. There could be no more lying to myself. The truth was brutally clear. Up until now, I had done everything in my power to shroud my brain in ignorance, to keep a layer between my life and the inevitable. I had clung to a fleeting belief that the doctors’ diagnosis of blindness by the age of thirteen had been wrong, that through force of will alone I would beat them, that I was only imagining the loss today, and tomorrow I would wake up to see the vivid green of the trees and the basketball hoop beyond. But standing in front of the window, only eight paces away, I knew I never would. I picked up a handful of heavy metal nails from a wooden box and hurled a bunch toward the hazy light. Pieces of glass exploded outward, spraying the ground. The air whistled out of my lungs and returned in shallow bursts. I aimed at another glint of light and heard it shatter too. Then I walked around the entire house, aiming and shattering, not wanting one window to be spared. I would gut the house; tear it from the inside out. I was shattering the last window when I heard a siren from a car coming up the driveway. I rushed out a gutted window and stumbled into the woods, barely feeling the trees that I was crashing into and the sharp branches scratching my face. I pushed forward, not knowing where my feet would land, hoping they touched soil. My momentum drove me forward. Another step and my feet soared through the air. I landed only a few feet down in a ditch and lay there trying to hold back my heart that was beating out of my chest. I lay motionless for an hour, listening for the sound of footsteps.
That night, I had a dream in which I was running frantically through the woods behind the empty house. My friends were far in front of me, and although I ran furiously, I was falling farther and farther behind. I could hear leaves and brush crashing behind me and smell rank hot breath on the back of my neck. It was overtaking me, and I was overwhelmed by the fear from knowing that there was nothing I could do. The woods were all shadows and flickers of light, twisting and intermingling, dancing and lunging, and I was running through it and it through me. I bounced off a tree trunk that twisted into the scaly head of a sea crock, opening its jaws to swallow me. I hurled myself back against a tree that held thick, gnarled, thrusting claws, and then I tripped over a slithering snake, thousands of them, wriggling and twisting and striking. Ground, rock, and sky swirled together in a crazy kaleidoscope of color and the whole scene shook monstrously before me. Then, I felt emptiness below me, and I was falling through a void of black sky. Above, I could hear the creature laughing, laughing and laughing, and it was the laugh of Chuck and Scott and Mitch, and it cackled, “Fall, Blindenheimer, fall. There is nothing to catch you.” And that was all I could do, fall and fall, strangely slow and suffocating, like sinking into muck, but when I reached out, it was only black empty sky with the faint glimpse of the earth disappearing above me. That is when I woke up, clutching my bed frame, listening to the desperate rasp of my own breathing and trying to shake the sinking motion of the dream.
The fear of blindness had loomed over me for so long, and I had never resigned myself to it. It felt like what I imagined dying would feel like. But no matter what I felt, no matter what I feared most, this death was coming, and whether I denied it was happening, or wished it away, whether I accepted it begrudgingly or embraced it fully, it was coming. It didn’t matter what I did or how much I kicked and screamed and fought. I had no say whether it would sweep or trickle over me, or whether it would hurt. It would come at its own pace, in the way it chose, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to change it.
Ironically, as I relinquished my grip on sight, I sank into bitter relief. I had not a clue how I would survive as a blind person, how I would cook a meal, walk around, read a book, but trying to live as a sighted person was becoming more painful than blindness could ever be, and the uncertainty of what each tomorrow would bring was almost more terrifying. I knew nothing about blindness. I had no action plan. All I knew was that I was sick and tired of getting lost on the playground and not being able to find the entrance to the school. I was tired of squinting my eyes and falling off docks, tired of trying to run down a trail in the woods or trying to shoot a basket. I couldn’t do any of it well. My head bashed against trees, my skin was always scraped and bleeding. I lived between blindness and sight. While I couldn’t see well enough to play visual games, to read a regular-print book, to see an equation on the blackboard, I also couldn’t accept myself as being blind. But one thing I knew: compared to this in-between world, total blindness couldn’t be any worse, or any more terrifying.