30 Years in a Blur

I couldn't see the price for unleaded from the stop sign, and it was less than a quarter mile away.  The sign was huge.  The sign was illuminated.  The sign was blurry.  I tried squinting, like I do when I'm trying to see the clock on the cable box at night, but no amount of squinting was going to make those numbers clearer.

"NOOOOOOOO," I cried.  "Why?!"


You see, vision has always been something of a point of pride for me.  "Oh, you can't see that sign two blocks away in the middle of the night?  No problem, I got you."  It's like being tall and reaching things nobody else can reach.  I've come to associate it with who I am.  "You wear glasses?  What's it like to wake up in the morning and just see a blur?  I can't imagine.  That seems terrible."

I formally apologize here to anyone I've gloated to in the past about my vision.  Yeah, bad vision does suck, but it's only worse when someone's rubbing it in your face.  "What's it like to be genetically inferior to me?"  I might as well have said that.

Karma.

I told my mom the other night that I noticed my vision getting blurry, and she said, "Well, you did better than me.  I had to get glasses in college."  Really?  In college?  I don't know why, but I've always associated my mom as having decent vision in her twenties and thirties.  Sure, the forties hit and she started doing that thing where she holds papers super far from her face and squints, but that was forties.  Everybody's old and falling apart in their forties, right?

Like the time I learned that Mardi Gras isn't a national thing ("Wait, not everybody gets days off in February to catch beads?"), I'm beginning to realize not everyone has to wait until their forties to fall apart.  Some of us are starting the trend early.  Or maybe this is late?  Is this like how there's Mardi Gras in Mobile but not really?

I'm convinced that books and computers are what did me in.  I remember one sunny day in college sitting in a hammock on my then-boyfriend's front porch and looking up from the book I was reading to find that I couldn't see him clearly a few feet away.

"That's how it started with my sister," he said when I told him.
"My vision's fine," I said.  "That won't happen to me."

Apparently feelings of invincibility aren't exclusive to college males.

Eventually, I bought a kindle to reduce glare when reading outside, and then I stopped reading outside.  Maybe I could temper the damage by cutting down on eye-stressors?  An old roommate of mine--now an optometrist in the midwest--suggested eye drops and consciously blinking more as I read and watched TV.  Apparently extended periods of time without blinking cause damage.  I blinked like there was no tomorrow.

But like diets that last more than a month, eventually I gave up on the blinking and went back to staring at a computer screen for hours at a time, unblinking and bloodshot.

It wasn't until recently that I began to notice how hard it is for me to see things clearly from far away.  Can't read the fine print on the wall art anymore.  Can't read kid's handwriting from a few feet away anymore.  I haven't quite graduated to large print books yet, but give me time.  I am nearly thirty.

Nearly thirty.  I think that's why this bothers me so much.  With the milestone fast-approaching, I've started paying more attention to the body issues that have been cropping up.  Yes, I'm pretty sure I've been aging this whole time and that none of these issues are all that new (that college incident, for example, was a full nine years ago).  But society will make you think crazy things, and here I am, writing crazy things on a pseudo-Halloween Friday night when I should be out living up the last two months of my twenties.  Even when you resist peer pressure, it ends up thwarting you.

Once I started worrying about my vision, I began to notice other things.  My skin didn't have the soft and young look it used to.  My makeup-less days are a little more tired-looking than they used to be.  Twenty-three year old men have stopped paying attention to me.  My sleep has fallen into a terrible rut.

I mean, yeah, the sleep is probably mostly psychological trauma from attic rodents and living alone in a city with a crime issue.  And every day, makeup-less or not, is looking worse for wear because I'm having trouble giving a shit in the morning.  And the skin, well, the skin's been getting a lot more sun than it's ever seen its life.  So, not surprising that I'm a little rough-looking these days.

Point is, I know I'm writing crazy things.  But I can't help it.  Age.  Gah.

Pretty soon, you'll hear me talk about my hair or skin or weight the way my mom does whenever pant sizes come up.

"I have to run back to my house to get some jeans," I tell her.
"I'd offer you some of mine, but they wouldn't fit."
"I'm a size six right now," I say.  "You're not a six?"
(I'm like a man when it comes to women's pant sizes--totally clueless to anything other than what my own tags say.)
"Honey, you might be able to find a size six in the vintage closet in Matthew's room, but I haven't been a six since I was on my honeymoon and weighed a hundred and ten pounds."

The bright side of the inevitable decline into reminiscence that age brings is that I will never have to talk about back when I was 110 pounds.  Because I think the last time I was 110 pounds was when I was twelve.  And if you knew me when I was twelve, you wouldn't daydream about that time either.  Poor dental hygiene and poorly-cut hair and a serious shyness problem.  And I wore a boat hat every single day.  Nah, I'll reminisce about that brief streak in my mid-to-late twenties when I habitually dated men who were way too young for me.  I was a cougar before my time.

The truth is, I'm mostly worried about all of this aging because it's new to me.  Retinols to slow wrinkles?  Essential oils to help with sleep?  Glasses?  I'm not one of those people who used to wish they had glasses. (I learned from that time when I wished for braces, got them, and then was submitted to something akin to torture for three years).  I don't know what I'll look like in glasses.  I don't know what kind of glasses fit my face best.  I don't know what to do when I'm wearing glasses.  What if I'm playing a sport?  What if I need to lean over?  What if something hits my face? What if I scratch them?  I have scratched every single pair of sunglasses I've ever owned.

The good news is that I'm still tall.  I may lose my smooth skin, my minimal eye bags, my soft hair, and my good vision.  But at least I'm still tall.

Until the osteoporosis kicks in.