Amblyopia

Covering my left eye would be pointless, according to the doctor. And maybe my effort is futile. Maybe she is right. But I patch up my left eye anyway. My left eye, my good eye, the only eye through which I can see shapes as anything beyond their blotchy silhouettes. I patch it up anyway. It has been a bully for long enough.

We have two eyes to process depth. If you had only one eye, you might be able to see clearly, but you wouldn’t be able to judge distance accurately, or catch an object whirling toward you. Actually, you’d have a pretty rough time getting along in any world that wasn’t entirely your own perception—in any world where other people also have eyes.

The whole world is a blur though my right eye. I regularly collide into freshly washed glass doors, and my teachers now give me homework, which has been blown up so large that a spaceman could read it. A spaceman with two functional eyes, that is. I am having enough trouble with algebra, without trying to drape my tablecloth sized assignments over my undersized chair-desk. My friends who aren’t afraid of me draw ladybugs and a fake eyeball on my patch, while I imagine none of this is happening.

Most of the time, I’m on another planet, where having one eye is the norm and I’m about to have my extraneous eye removed—cut right out of my head. But of course this is actually happening. My life is the scribbly turquoise iris Kaitlyn is drawing on my Nexcare eye patch, and I am legally blind in that eye.

You have beautiful eyes, says Mom. I wish that had something to do with it, Mom. I really wish that mattered. Dad says eye patches are better than scurvy. Dad, as much as I love pirates, I don’t want to look like one.

I don’t believe in miracles, and sometimes I still think my brain is making things up for me whenever I cover up my good eye and see the world through what was once my rebellious eye, my eye that decided, without my permission, that it didn’t want to befriend my brain and do its job like the other one.