Sight

I hate wear­ing glasses. I hate my dread­ful eye­sight, my myopia. I hate that every time I go to get new glasses, I am thrown back in time (four-eyes! / fourth grade, cricket ball arcs towards my head, smashes against my face, splin­ters of glass / head­aches because the glass is get­ting too heavy / fears my retina will detach / losing my glasses under the waves at Manly, the feel of them as they slip through my fin­gers, are car­ried out to sea, my father’s fury / fifth grade, the every-day terror of doing for­ward rolls or indeed any sort of gym, fear that my glasses will smash if I wear them, fear that I can’t see a thing and will hurt myself if I don’t, when I try to do a cartwheel over a vault, I hes­it­ate, bunny hop, the teacher flips me up from the waist and I flail, ter­ri­fied, fall off the mat on my back / the day the kids stole my glasses in the Aus­tralian Museum year seven and the fear of the unknown place, feel­ing my way along dusty cab­in­ets trying to find my way back to the day­light / the day I smashed them acci­dent­ally onto the con­crete floor at Jeff’s shed with a chop­stick at the Sword­fish premià¨re). I hate that this is effect­ively a result of loving books, of read­ing under the covers at night with a torch, and only partly genet­ics so I really only have myself to blame. I hate the way my glasses make it awk­ward to kiss someone with aban­don and that without them I can’t see the face of someone I’m kiss­ing if I step back more than 10 cen­ti­metres. I hate how they make me look, severe and book­ish. I hate that my beau­ti­ful green con­tact lenses which I love don’t cor­rect my astig­mat­ism prop­erly so I simply can’t wear them for com­puter work. I hate that my pre­scrip­tion is so stu­pidly strong, plastic lenses are enorm­ously thick and the glass lenses that are thin­ner are heavy so I have to have really small lenses. I hate that I scratched a lens while I was in Sydney a month ago and that because of my stupid spe­cial ultra-thin glass, a new lens would cost $304, just for one lens. I hate that when I then think “Hey, may as well take this oppor­tun­ity to get new glasses then. I’ll get rim­less glasses and then I won’t look like I’m wear­ing glasses”, they tell me I can only do that with plastic lenses, so they’ll be really thick again. And that even then, it will cost a for­tune because of my stu­pidly strong prescription.

I ordered new glasses today. $542. I could have bought an iPod. I could have bought a hun­dred things other than this and not gone through this emo­tional rollercoaster.

I swear, if one person so much as snig­gers at the thick­ness of my glasses when I get them, I’m going back to glass ones with rims so quickly you won’t see my dust.

Go on, tell me good glasses stor­ies. Cheer me up. I can think of two good stor­ies for me: the Hugh Jack­man story that came about because of me smash­ing them at the premià¨re and the “I always make passes at girls who wear glasses” e‑card that raven_ sent me when we were seeing each other.