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Before I lost my right eye in a ditch by the rail tracks, I heard some pigs lament their squandered destiny.
I laughed.
“How the fuck do you squander a destiny?”
They grunted back, “You obviously have no idea what it’s like to be a pig.”
To be honest, I’d just done some shrooms when I queried those pigs.
But I remembered them just fine.
They’d been by the ditch where I’d lost my right eye.
A year passed before I went by the same ditch.
My right eye spotted me first.
“Cooey, cooey, it’s me, remember?”
I pretended I didn’t see it.
I had a patch covering the spot where my right eye used to be.
The patch gave me clout.
An air of intrigue.
I spun stories about dueling with rapiers.
Firing pistols at dawn.
Women ate them up.
Men kept their distance.
My old eye said, “Dig the eyepatch, man, nice touch, very Johnny Depp. Did you miss me?”
Truly, our sanity is on lease or a divine gift.
Because I squandered it then.
Because I picked the eye up.
Because guilt is the mother of self-destruction.
𓁺
When I popped the eye back in, it groaned, “Ah, that feels so fucking good, man…just don’t start getting off on yourself. I mean there were other takers. I had a ton of interest. Just none of their sockets fit, so, yeah, just saying.”
My right eye had changed color to blue over that year.
With my left eye being hazel, my right eye suggested I take up the guitar.
“Burn your passport. Become a Bowie-type busker. A modern-day minstrel. Take a tramp steamer to Shanghai. See the world.”
I took its advice and got a following on TikTok.
But I hadn’t counted on its resentment for being abandoned.
How much it hated my other eye for staying behind.
To distract me, it showed me all the cool things it had seen while it had been out of my head: I had video on demand wired straight to my brain. Live streaming whenever I wanted.
I saw drug deals, shoot outs, hook-ups and trysts, romance and tragedy.
I quit my Netflix subscription.
All the while my right eye had been cutting off the blood supply to my left eye.
I never saw it coming.
Until one morning I woke up and couldn’t see out of my left eye.
Then my right eye showed me all the bad shit I had done.
The unanswered texts. The not giving seats on buses to pregnant women and the elderly. The screaming at crying children at baseball games—all the way through to the cheating, drinking, and lying, the squandered opportunities to lessen the suffering of others, the malice I couldn’t control in myself…
I ripped the fucking thing out.
𓁺
Thing is, it’s okay being sightless.
The tips are bigger.
Some women like it.
I’ve got a Stevie Wonder, troubadour-like gig going.
I’ve learned to echolocate.
I’ve drawn fresh maps in my head.
I hid my eye in a place no one will find it.
If I ever need to see through it, I know where to go.
But I can’t see it happening.
Because I really can see now, if differently from before.
Sometimes I can get so close to perceiving my thoughts, I can touch them.
