A Thursday night like any other. My eyes are tired but no more so than usual. I brush my teeth, undress, turn on the bedside lamp, lie down, and pick up Bomarzo. I’m 42 pages in but tonight the words run off the page. I squint. I rub my eyes, my nose, my temples. The letters wave and scurry away. Hula girls and cockroaches. A blurry sort of flux which frightens me.

I close my right eye. Ok. A bit of a strain but the words make sense again. The letters reaffix themselves to the page in their proper place. I close my left eye and the page goes strange again. A void opens up in my central vision. The page has been my refuge since I was a kid. Words and sentences forming stories. A gateway to other worlds and minds. Self-understanding and escape. A little shelter to seek when battling transcendental homelessness. I close both eyes. I close Bomarzo with what the back of the book calls its sumptuous prose. Maybe it’s just too rich a meal for me tonight? I turn off the light. No time for catastrophes and whining. Hypochondria is a persistent sickness. Rest is a powerful cure.

But in the morning the blur is back. It has probably never left. I imagine the back of my eyelids blurring too. Inexplicable abysses swallowing up my dreams.

I call optometrists, ophthalmologists. Hello, do you take new patients? Do you have any appointments today? I google “eye exams” and “temporary blindness” and “stroke symptoms.” I wonder if this is how my father felt with his visual world collapsing in on him as he suffered from macular degeneration.

Left eye: sun through the window, bare branches, a Pittsburgh December sky.

Right eye: The Matisse print on the wall lopsided. Lydia Delectorskya weeping, melting.

I find a place, eureka. An eye surgery office up in the suburbs. I shower and dress.

Left eye: the familiar jeans and gray t-shirt.

Right eye: a green shirt that is a remarkable double for the one I own. The same color, the same texture. But a new sort of haze to the fabric. I miss the original.

I look at something called the Amsler Grid on their website.

Left eye: a white grid with black vertical and horizontal lines and a black dot in the middle. Reminds me of graph paper from math class.

Right eye: the lines shift and swim like the grid is messing with me. Like the world is. A spitball on the back of the retina. A bag of burning dogshit on the stoop of my senses, stinking up and obscuring my world.

Waiting room 1. Coughing. Forms. Other patients shifting in chairs. Christmas music. A woman takes me to another room and tests my eyes. I read various letters.

Left eye: the usual clarity minus the usual degradation of age.

Right eye: a joke. A taunt. Ink running like the yolk in over-easy eggs. The technician dilates my pupils.

Waiting room 2. The lights have halos. Tis the Season. But I’m not a Christian. I’m just a run-of-the-mill god-starved agnostic trying to make meaning by writing. Trying to find it in every book I read. Seeking solace and purpose in art, in language, in the intimate rhythm of prose.

A new tech arrives. She takes photos of my eyes. I press my chin and forehead in the device. There is no chit-chat. An ominous feeling grips my chest. Like I’m on the threshold of something. A paralyzing dread. The ghost I saw as a kid. I exited my bedroom in the middle of the night and was turning to the right toward the bathroom when out of the corner of my eye, past the dining room and near the den, an apparition formed. Terror gripped my guts. For years later, even knowing it was nothing but a creature of a child’s overactive imagination, I never looked left when I went to the bathroom at night. The world, its shadows, and the mysteries lurking therein.

Waiting room 3 is vast and mostly empty. I listen to a video about cataracts. I listen to a video about kids having to go outdoors so they don’t ruin their eyes as they form. Did I go outdoors enough? I remember woods. Fields. Grass. Suburban adventures on bikes and skateboards. I’m not sure how this is quantified. What’s enough. Who decides. The video might tell me but the second tech is back. I’m put in a room. The doctor arrives. Young, younger than me. A firm handshake. Friendly demeanor. He looks at my eyes with a jeweler’s loupe. Flashes his penlight. He pulls up photos of both of my retinas and points at some leakage. Fluid where it shouldn’t be. Protein. Cells. Blood. Swelling. He speaks fast. Says he needs to refer me to a specialist. I ask him to speculate. He says it could be macular telangiectasia. That we—whoever this we is—tend to see it in men in their 40s and 50s. Says there are treatments, shots and lasers, and the good thing is we know what’s wrong now. That I just need a prognosis and a treatment plan. I want to ask him if the world will ever appear as clear as it did yesterday. If I’ll ever finish Bomarzo. But his speech is hurried. The pace of an overbooked doctor in an ailing America.

I leave with the words “macular telangiectasia” on a piece of scrap paper, a printout of the details for the retinal specialist’s office, and a $40 copay. The woman at the desk wishes me a merry Christmas.

I exit the office. The world is even blurrier now. Harsher. Must be the dilated pupils. It’s cold out. I sit in the car and google macular telangiectasia. The internet tells me it’s untreatable and degenerative. I don’t blame the doctor for not wanting to deliver bad news. It’s the holiday season. It’s Friday afternoon.

Left eye: a steering wheel hyper clear.

Right eye: a muddy windshield.

I turn on the car. A dry heat blows. Bing croons. The bitter smell of burning oil from a leaky head gasket. I google Bomarzo + audiobook. There isn’t one.

Left eye: the highway home.

Right eye: grayness passing for sky.

Left eye: the old me, his old interests, jobs, and passions.

Right eye:  

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Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. He has recent work in Burning House Press, Heavy Feather Review, 3:AM Magazine, ONE ART, Some Words and elsewhere. His novella, Adar’s Freedom, is available now through Subtle Body Press. You can read more at kentkosack.net