For the most part of my life outside of the day job, I write, sometimes utter rubbish rejected by publishers. Sometimes small delights that I will publish for very little people to read, but I am published nonetheless. And when the feeling takes me I head out with my camera, snapping society doing whatever they happen to be doing at the time. Both past times require eyesight that can withstand that closeness of vision. Being able to detect the minute changes in a word, or even spelling or to capture that right image, controlling what comes out the other end.
For the last few years I have worn a very light reader, for use with computers, I spend ninety-nine percent of my day on one. Then there is the phone, the tablet just to add to that strain. I have never needed glasses for anything beyond that computer screen, or any closer. Until I noticed something, I was struggling to manually focus my camera. Taking photos that just got thrown to the digital realm of non-existence, becoming nothing but a bad taste in my mind. I spent time checking over the lens, the camera, when sadly it dawned on me that my fortieth decade had crept up behind me and pushed my slightly fuzzy reading issue into a blurry mess of undeniable anti-focus power, a superhero whose supervision is now more Terrorvision after Tequila.
Among my peers and elders, I was always the odd one out, my sight was perfect. Twenty Twenty vision in all its IMAX glory. Spotting objects in the sky, or a lone ant in a sea of dirt, so for my body to start to rebel against this perfection was hard to believe. And when I realised that even though my photographed subject was some metres away from me, my vision of what I was seeing in the viewfinder was lying to me. I had lost all hope in my vision being what I needed it to be. No more could I trust my aging eyes to do the job I required of them.
I dragged my clearly, or more, slightly fuzzy aging eyes to my optician. All the blinding lights and hideous air blowing and dot following ensued, to find out what I already knew, I needed stronger glasses for near work. The fate of my eyes was sealed. I of course got myself some Cubitts frames, which I had been trialling for a few months for comfort and I was set. Now, wearing glasses has never bothered me, they were just glasses, but when I was called to pick up my new super strong prescription, I was advised that my “readers were ready”, readers? Readers! I had moved over into a time when rather than glasses for near site computer work, I now owned READERS!
After my annoyance at my own eyes waned, I settled into my new life of carrying my glasses around with me, a lot. Nearly everywhere. And being annoyed when I had to move menus in restaurants around before I could focus on them as I had not brought or forgotten my readers.
I felt, and somewhat still feel let down by my eyes, like Samson having his haircut and losing his strength, my strength of having great working eyes has been ripped from me, to live in a close up blurry world, but at least I can still see the light on the horizon.