episode 13, wherein our heroine looks at vision

I’ll skip the recap on my mood of the last 2 weeks and just get to the goods – today I lost my glasses. My sweet, beloved, neo-hipster blue-gray Gucci frames. Girlfriend cannot catch a break. Forget the fact I’m fucking blind. These glasses were my force field. I hide behind my glasses like other people hide behind hair, food, or political asylum. I was without defense today. I walked into the theatre to read a script and it was like looking at Daryl though the aura of a GE soft light bulb. Good lord, D, have you always been that attractive? Don’t answer that.

Did I look in my pockets? Yes. Did I look in my purse? Yes. Did I look on my head? Yes, smartass. I know exactly what happened, as I had placed my glasses inside one of my gloves in my purse hoping to protect them from getting scratched by my keys. I exited the train at West 4th, went to put on the gloves and the glasses must have fallen out onto the platform. No more glasses. No one turned them into the station master. They no doubt will be on sale tonight on someone’s blanket on 6th Avenue.

So all of this back and forth between station masters and dropping by the theatre has now made me late to meet Jane and Sue for lunch (thank you, Rev. King), so I just suck it up and make my way across town, like one of the mole people, to this restaurant on Waverly called Apple. It is kinda Japanese, kinda Thai, kinda Vietnamese, and while it has a lovely vibe and I enjoyed my beef stew box, the place felt like it was suffering from an Asian identity crises. Maybe I was just more keen to the restaurant’s issues, seeing as how I had a sight handicap and my other senses were no doubt heightened. Or maybe it’s just my state of being verklemt bleeding into everything else.

Jane’s trying to cheer me up, I think. It’s like your blogs are being written by somebody else, she says. For a moment, this makes me wonder if we've even met; but you see, maybe that’s the thing. We all have our public personas, the people that we are with each other. I'm more likely to tell you over a cup of coffee about a great audition I had than about having to spread boric acid on my floors to the point that it looks like a workshop for cocaine production, or the fact that I couldn't raise my arm enough this morning to get a comb through my hair because of my recurring back injury and I'm popping Advil like Jujubes, or that I wound up shedding a few tears in the shower because the guy I care most about (against all logic, by the way) doesn't want me or he'd be with me. I probably won't tell you that over coffee. But here, you see…here I can wrestle with myself and I’m not even selling tickets.

Is life so horrible for me? Please. The bad comes with the good and right now it's just a rough patch; I know this. To just write about the good stuff, however, would be to just tell half the story, not unlike only telling you about my good audition over coffee. And then my story morphs into how it affects someone else's story (yours, even) and that I find most interesting: how a few random thoughts of one person (mine or yours) can affect the random thoughts of another. You may interpret my words as you choose – hell, you can disagree with them. But really, it’s about how we touch one another, not about what I may or may not expose about myself. No, I don't always have my shit together. I'm only human, after all, and we've all got our frailties. You get a glimpse of what’s behind the mask and, if I’m lucky at all, maybe somehow whatever I’ve shared has given you something to think about, even something to act upon.

As for me, the mask, like my glasses, serves a purpose. These are my security blankets as much as they are portals for vision. The safety I find behind glasses is not unlike what I find upon the stage or behind a camera, or even behind the written word. It allows me to communicate at a comfortable distance in a stripped-down way that perhaps otherwise I would not. For a few minutes maybe you’ve seen things a little differently, you’ve enjoyed the show, maybe just the sense of communion that a frank conversation can bring. Afterwards, you go back to your existance, and I go into my bathroom and take it off: the mask, the glasses and the mascara behind them that some days looks a little worse for wear, wash, rinse and take a long, hard, fuzzy look at who I’m going to bed with. It’s not always pretty, folks, and when I wake up in the morning (good, bad and ugly), damned if she’s not there.