Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE POROUSNESS OF CERTAIN BORDERS (XI)

As in all those other dreams, I’m with somebody I know but don’t know how I know them, and now this person suddenly points out to me that I’m blind. As in literally blind, unsighted, etc. Or else it’s in the presence of this person that I suddenly realize I’m blind. What happens when I realize this is I get sad. It makes me incredibly sad that I’m blind. The person somehow knows how sad I am and warns me that crying will hurt my eyes somehow and make the blindness even worse, but I can’t help it. I sit down and start crying really hard. I wake crying in bed, and I’m crying so hard I can’t really see anything or make anything out or anything. This makes me cry even harder. My girlfriend is concerned and wakes up and asks what’s the matter, and it’s a minute or more before I can even get it together enough to realize that I was dreaming and I’m awake and not really blind and that I’m crying for no reason, then to tell my girlfriend about the dream and get her input on it. Then all day at work then I’m incredibly conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be able to see colors and people’s faces and to know exactly where I am, and of how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost, how I’m always seeing blind people around with their canes and strange-looking faces and am always just thinking of them as interesting to spend a couple seconds looking at and never thinking they had anything to do with me or my eyes, and how it’s really just a lucky coincidence that I can see instead of being one of those blind people I see on the subway. And all day at work whenever this stuff strikes me I start tearing up again, getting ready to start crying, and only keeping myself from crying because of the cubicles’ low partitions and how everybody can see me and would be concerned, and the whole day after the dream is like this, and it’s tiring as hell, my girlfriend would say emotionally draining, and I sign out early and go home and I’m so tired and sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open, and when I get home I go right in and crawl in bed at like 4:00 in the afternoon and more or less pass out.