|
>>
|
2ca12e.jpg
Floating Candy
2ca12e
>>96223
You can kind of think of it, As cliche as this is, As a plane's navigation suite. Not only do they have sonar, The obvious parallel to hearing. They also have radiometric scanners that can pick up electromagnetic fields and thermal imaging that can sense heat. It's kind of the same with a person sans vision.
Like, Right now. I'm on my couch. I'm curled in my ugly-ass Christmas quilt with my laptop in front of me and my earbuds in. Sonically, I'm blind to everything except the music I'm listening to. But I'm still getting plenty. I can smell my boyfriend to my right, The smell of the thanksgiving dinner we just got back from still strengthening whenever he mutters a curse at his DS. Most every smell in front of me is being covered up by the sugar and alcohol smell from the Rum and coke I mixed us when we got back. I can smell my vacuum cleaner behind me in a closet at about 5 o'clock, maybe 5:30. I vacuumed before we left, Which I've learned to do counting steps in my head and listening for the drag of the cord so I don't suck it up. Smells like warm dust. I can smell that bowl cleaner thing in our toilet in the same hallway. I'm told it makes the water blue, I haven't taken my big reading glasses in there to confirm these claims.
I'll also stress that time is a huge factor. I've been partially blind for over a decade and almost entirely blind for 4 years. I've had plenty of time to practice. In the first few weeks after the last glaucoma attack I wasn't able to do much of anything. This was due to a combo of my lack of practice and will to bitch about my condition like it was the end of my life. A time or two I tried to make it the end of my life, As is common among the disabled. For about two weeks I was bed ridden, I moped around at home all day. I refused to go to rehab for the cane lessons, I just sat around waiting to wither but not without the numbing drops the ER had given me. (Glaucoma attacks block off the vent for the fluid in your eye ball and increase pressure until it damages the cones in your eye, It hurts similar to a kidney stone.) After 13 days of crying and self pitying and almost ruining my relationship I was laying silent in bed after my boyfriend had gone off to work, Listening to the world outside my window and muttering preteen-grade bitter quips about how I deserved to see more than the people I could hear outside, Like a total shithead.
Then I noticed that I could hear a bell and the sound of some woman muttering something. That was actually the morning announcements of the elementary school a block down from us. Soon after that I started noticing differences in the sounds of my foot steps on the way to the bathroom, I could actually tell if I was close to a wall. For some time I was lead around on the arm of my boyfriend or the friends I was with or my physical therapist (Once I stopped being a shithead and went for the cane lessons) and found myself disoriented once they let go, I was making a map of the sounds and smells around me, but it wasn't connected to the map I was making earlier. I started preferring to walk at my own pace eventually learned to go around town solo. I can cross a street on my own, I can hear the light buzzes of the signals and the car engines idling at a red. And I've been pretty lucky. The worst thing that's anyone's done to me was purposefully mistake a 20 for a 5, But now I don't carry much money on hand and it's all dollar coins that I can identify by touch. (I am literally the reason my credit union stocks dollar coins.) and it actually nets me free stuff all the time. I've had bartenders write off $100+ tabs, I've had grocery store managers come up and chat with me while running their over-ride cards to give me all sorts of discounts I'm not supposed to get, I've shared taxis with people who went out of their way and covered my part of the toll. All without ever asking for sympathy. I don't want to tempt fate, But it's kind of sweet.
|