This Year, I Lived.

So, for 22 years of my life, I had to wear glasses. Since a young age, I felt this a curse. It was normal for me, of course, but I always felt abnormal because of it. Why did everyone else get to just see when I needed these awkward frames that needed readjustment every five seconds and got fogged up all the time and had to be removed when I'd shower or play contact sports or try to swim or have sex or go to sleep? How unfair is that?! So anyway, not too long before my 23rd birthday, I went through a shitty break-up; the kind that makes you want to reinvent yourself. So, although I'd always thought-and I don't know where this thought came from-that I was stuck in this half-happy life of pushing up my glasses on my nose like a typical tv nerd, I decided one drunken night that I'd get tested for contact lenses. I make crazy plans while drunk but the next morning, when I awoke and felt like dying, I thought "Fuck this shít, I'm gonna stick to the promise I made myself" and I called up Specsavers and made an appointment.

Four weeks and three failed attempts at my "lens test" later, I finally managed to get the stupid things into my eyes. It sounds dramatic but, believe me when I say, the decision to follow through on that drunken idea has literally changed my life. But anyway, that is all just back-story. What made me smile was.... Last night, I decided to walk home after work. It was 3:30am. It was cold, dark, dreary and raining. I walked alone, listening to my iPod and singing along. I love walking in the rain. I LOVE it. And the reason that I love it, and the reason that I smile is that, these days, since that decision, I can walk in the rain and listen to my iPod and sing along and I can see the world around me. I can see the streetlights reflecting off the wet pavement and the drunks hailing cabs, the couples journeying home and the pubs all closing. I can see it all and I never once have to stop, blurry eyed as I wipe the precipitation from my shaky glasses. I can see the world in all its rainy glory the way it's meant to be. And when I do, I feel normal. I feel great. It's the tiniest of mercies but, to me, it literally means the world.