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8/20/2003 07:04:40 PM
I understand now why Superman thought glasses could plausibly disguise him. I just started wearing glasses again after eleven years of wearing only contact lenses. And I swear to you. I feel like I'm unrecognizable. 8/10/2003 02:26:47 PM
tonight, tonight
I love taking walks in the summer at night. I could walk forever, around and around through the silent streets. this is when i like the suburbs. in the day when the sun is glinting bright off everything, it all looks like a commercial for toothpaste. at night things are themselves, vulnerable, each bush is an angelic sleeping child.
The air feels bath-water warm and smells of lilacs.... I may have picked up this night-walking fetish from my mother. she used to take me on walks around our neighborhood at night, looking into each lighted box to see what couch they had, how the bookshelves looked in their den. here's the couple shushing their wailing newborn.... here's the man in an armchair leaning over, talking to someone unseen. here an upstairs light ticks on, there a downstairs light ticks off. they are all separated into their boxes for the night, with only each other. there is nothing but tranquility here; even the couple with the crying baby is a two-person unit. it's all a black-and-white movie, with an ending so tender it just makes you feel lonely. the five stars in the sky hang just above the rooftops, as blessings.
I think of summer in general, the heat and the stickiness of day, and then i remember crickets. crickets come with summer. where are they? they have been chirping loudly this whole time. cricket cricket cricket (rogue cicada) (rogue cicada).... random thoughts whir in a centrifuge, they fling themselves out from the center and stick to the walls and make grotesque patterns like bug splotches on a windshield. ...mostly i love walking at night in the summer with someone else; it is as intimate as being snuggled under the covers, this bath-water warm....
headlights rise up suddenly. the car pauses for a few seconds at the corner where i stand, and i see there's a young couple inside. the woman passenger looks out the window at me and wrinkles her brow and then they drive off, whispering something about the crazy loner i'm sure, but i can't hear it over the crickets.
My eyes had begun getting dry and scratchy sometime last summer, and I decided in October of 2002 that I would become a glasses-wearer. It took me almost one year to pick out a pair of frames. And not just because I'm inordinately picky (though that is true.) They are very expensive, first of all, and I am poor. And on top of the financial pressure to pick the right pair, there's a lot of options. I didn't want to look too fake-hipster or old-ladyish. I could not touch anything that remotely resembled the horrible wire frames I wore in sixth grade. I must've gone to twenty different opticians. I collected businesses cards at all of them, with my top choices scrawled on the back. I asked at least six random strangers where they got their glasses. (All but one named a city far away -- Indianapolis or San Francisco; is D.C. so transient that no one has an in-town optician?) I spent hours and hours plucking frames from their plastic display racks and putting them on my face. I got so good that after nine months, I could eyeball (ha ha) exactly which frames were my size and suited my face shape.
So I have these new glasses. They're the half-frame kind. My friend Cleo has a sort of similar pair, but mine are tortoise and hers are black. (That was another consideration. Could I get the same glasses as Cleo? What is it with glasses? Must they be like fingerprints? Maybe.) And anyway, wearing them is really weird. I feel like I have cataracts all the time. (Smudges. How do they get there? By the end of the day, it looks like I've been eating pizza and wiping my fingers on the lenses.) I can't walk down stairs correctly or cross streets without worrying about dying. (Peripheral vision. Who knew how important it could be?) And they keep sliding down my nose, which makes me wonder if all people are perpetually nudging their glasses back into place or if it's just me. (Has my nose suddenly become extra-oily? What the fuck.)
And even weirder, I'm looking at the world through a window. When I was in high school, I had this revelation (I was having a revelation every other day back then) that I always saw the world as though I were trapped inside a clear plastic shield. (I was indeed wearing contact lenses every day; that may have been the reason for the feeling, but I doubt it.) And now -- now! after trying for years to do away with that shield of un-connection, that shy and halting girl I was, I am here again with a big ole window in front of my eyes. I swear it changes things. I feel more invisible. Maybe because most of the time when you look out a window (like a bus window or a car window) you can't usually be seen back. Or at least it feels that way. It feels safe; you're tucked away inside, peering out.
But people can see me, and they say I barely look different. How can I not look different? I walked into the office wearing them for the first time and passed two people who looked at me but didn't notice a thing. A piece of molded plastic is sitting smack in the middle of my face. How could I be anything but unrecognizable? I pointed the glasses out and they complimented me (That's the nice thing about working in an almost all-female office... people care about these things. My male boss simply busted out laughing when the glasses were brought to his attention.)
I only felt validated in my disguised-ness the next day, when in the hallway I passed a man who works in the office suite next door. I smiled politely as co-workers in our building do. And he did a double-take: "Oh. Sorry. You look different with the glasses."