These eyes. My eyes. Mine. The way they connect to my brain and these images mean
more than textures. The way I blink and how I don’t just feel my eyelashes tapping my
skin, but I can see the way day turns to night and back to day again in a matter of
seconds. The people around me and the way their names are no longer simply the way
their voice sounds or the outline of their face but the sight of their smiles and their hair
falling on their shoulders. Words evolving from sounds to figures on a paper.
Conversations changing from the noises of talking to the curl of lips. All of these colors
and all of these shapes. The feelings my hands and my ears were never able to feel for
me.

When I was born my doctor told my mom to be grateful I was born blind rather than
being born able to see but then later lost my sight at an older age. Experts say it is much
harder for someone to adapt to the lack of vision if they did have eyesight at a previous
point in their life. And for fourteen years I grew up hating this sentence. I thought it
much better to be blind but know how yellow looks like, and if it feels in your eyes the
way sun felt on my skin. But after the surgery, when I woke up in the middle of the
night to darkness, having to hold the palms of my hands immediately in front of my
eyes to make sure I could still see them, I began to realize what losing my vision would
mean to me now. How I’d no longer long to see the naked trees during winter, covered
in snow, but now I’d actually miss seeing them. I pictured myself gradually forgetting
the way mountains look, or the reflections of light in water. Like pictures in a gallery
being stolen and leaving behind nothing but blank walls. And it’s at these moments that
I think back on the contract of the surgery unable to determine whether agreeing to it
was a mistake or not. If these eyes, my eyes, are a mistake.

It started with a woman in Berlin. Amalie Fieke was 33 when a heated scrap metal from
an oven bounced off her eye and she gradually began losing her eyesight. She says the
faces of her children slowly faded into blurry shapes, until she could only hear their
voices and imagine them walking when she heard footsteps. The doctor she consulted
with proposed an eye implant surgery a few years later that was still in its trial but was
expected to work. Dr. Whitman, my doctor, told me the very idea of the implant would
have been enough to discourage Amalie, but she decided to do it anyway. Her doctor
fashioned an eye implant using parts of her teeth, and the surgery had very positive
results, earning Fieke’s doctor international recognition. The surgery developed and
seven years later my own doctor proposed the procedure to my mom and me. He told us
he was very confident that with my profile the teeth implant would work, but that since
the surgery of Amalie Fieke some of the people who had the procedure gained their
eyesight but lost it again a few years later. This was enough to make my mom oppose
the surgery completely. She is the kind of person who would rather not love at all than
love and lose, so even though the odds of me losing my sight were a mere 10% against
the 90% certainty that the procedure would work, she refused to pay for it. Thankfully, after the rough divorce of my parents, my dad became much more inclined to making
decisions that went against my mother’s preferences, so a few weeks later I was in the
hospital bed prepping for surgery.

It was surprising how quick the procedure was. Almost offensive to think years of
darkness could be lit in 4 hours. I spent two days in the recovery room, and at this time I
had cloths covering my eyes, but even then I could perceive a change in my vision. My
mom spent the first day with me, and my dad the second, and neither of them talked to
me much, almost like they were scared that because I would now be able to see, I
wouldn’t be able to talk anymore, as if my senses were interchangeable. Instead, both of
them watched TV. My parents and friends had described a television for me before,
usually with words like square or cube, and they described other things like laptop or
book with these words, but none of the words actually meant anything to me because I
couldn’t relate them to anything but the words themselves. I thought of me
understanding these words. I thought of my parents watching TV. And I thought of me
watching TV as well.

I could tell my mom was watching a documentary by the way the voices sounded. It
was about marine life, and the creatures living in the depth of the ocean. There was this
block about a fish species called blind cavefish. It said these kind of fish are a mutation
rooted from genes gone unused. Basically, the species begun with several organisms
who decided to build their habitats in dark caves, and gradually their descendants
evolved until they no longer had eyes because there was no need to have them.
Scientists call this convergent evolution, which is simply organisms adapting to their
ecological challenges. I thought of my ancestors, and I wondered if my great
grandfather lived in a dark cave, or if my great-great grandmother closed her eyes for
too long, and if that was why I was born blind, because somehow my cells thought there
was no advantage to eyesight anymore. I was a convergent evolution.

After the surgery, my vision didn’t come immediately. It developed throughout several
months and it required therapy and many visual exercises, which meant for me there
was never a big shock over being able to see. Throughout the whole process I found
myself looking at my hands a lot, tracing the outlines of my fingers with my line of
vision. I did this most at night, when I had to make sure I hadn’t imagined the surgery
and its success. By the fifth month, I had perfect eyesight, and by this point I was
almost accustomed to my new life style. The doctor said my progress was text book
perfect, and once he was done with the compulsory check ups that the procedure called
for, his appointments with me became much more sporadic. I saw him every three
months or so, and after a year, every five months. He’d call every now and then to
check on me, but he was confident of my eyes’ health.

Three years after the surgery, however, I noticed a change in my vision. Things were a
little blurrier and objects seemed more distant. I didn’t want to tell my mom about it, because I knew she would immediately assume my vision was deteriorating and I would
be blind again, but when the decay in my vision became undeniably evident, I had to
tell her. Dr. Whitman made an appointment with me immediately two days after we
called him. He sat us down in his office, and ran me through the routine eyesight tests.
After he came up with the results, he smiled calmly and told us what was going on. He
said my vision deteriorating should be as alarming to us as it would be to someone who
wasn’t once blind. He said all that was happening was that, like any normal human
being, I would need glasses. It didn’t mean the surgery hadn’t worked, it simply meant
my eyes were working averagely. So I got glasses, beginning with a graduation of 1.25
points in both eyes. Slowly, though, my eyesight got worse. 6 months after the original
graduation, I was up to 2.50 points, then 3 points, and eventually 4.5 points. Although
alarming, Dr. Whitman remained calm through all the graduation changes and adaptions
to my glasses. That was, at least, until yesterday.

I was in drawing class, and I thought I had an eyelash on my eye, or lint, or something
of the sort, but the slight itch developed into a burning sensation and then partial loss of
my sight. I called my mom and she took me to the hospital where Dr. Whitman
requested an operation room and I was in an operation table within minutes. After
waving around the light of his ophthalmoscope around my eyes, he told me the teeth
implant had lost its original attachment, scratching my iris and threatening to leave
permanent damage. He said, however, that immediate intervention would probably
prevent me losing my vision completely. The nurse came afterwards with the
anesthesia, and the syringe went through my veins. I felt the cold liquid run through my
arm, and I wanted to see it. I wanted to see my arm, but the anesthesia kicked in, and I
fell asleep thinking if I would ever see my arm again.

The first thing I felt when I woke up in the recovery room was the cloth over my eyes. It
was more humid than it had been last time, and it stuck to my skin like tape. I ran my
fingers across the fabric and felt the rise and fall of my eyelids, the mountains and
valleys shaped by my eyes. These eyes. My eyes. Mine. Near my temple, the cloth
ended and I began lifting it up, knowing I wouldn’t see anything immediately because
that type of recovery room was always dark, telling myself not to panic. I felt my skin
being lifted up with the cloth, and I wondered how badly the nurse would yell at me if
she realized what I was doing. I pulled the last bit of the fabric with a sharp tug and I
opened my eyes. Even the still air in the room hurt the corners of my iris and I wanted
to close my eyes again, but I forced myself not to. In the dark room, I felt as though I
was simply in my own bedroom, waking up in the middle of the night like I often do,
attempting to focus my eyes and prove I could still see. I imagined myself in my own
bed, doing a routine check of my vision, breathing in and out deeply to keep myself
calm. I held up my hands in front of my eyes and I focused on my fingers, squinting to
make sure I could trace their outline against the dark of the room.