Euphoria | Tamamlandı

one and only chapter

Pitch black everywhere, drowning me, sucking me into its desperate storm, whirling me around in it's dizzying tornado of fear and worry. It's eating me whole until I can't breathe anymore, I see the blinding headlights before me. I hear the screams of our car's tires against the cold road, and then I feel pain. Lots of it. I feel myself falling into darkness again. Then I wake up.

These nightmares have been happening to me since that car crash 3 years ago. As an aspiring painter, I of course hadn't expected  my doctor to say "The crash effected your eyesight and from now on, your eyesight will begin to decrease. It will be completely gone in about five years. I'm very sorry."  

You know when you feel so clueless, so desperate that you can't feel properly. It was like someone cut my vocal chords and I was unable to speak when I first heard it. I was helpless, I expected the doctors to be like "A few broken bones but you'll be fine" or something, wasn't that what always happened in movies?It took me a while to understand movies do not actually reflect reality. Most of them come from the sickeningly pale part of the brain, the part where everything is happy with rainbows and butterflies. The world was dark, it was pitch black and people were just trying to swim through the darkness to find some grey. Nobody really succeeded. 

When I got that, I made peace with the idea of blindness. The world's colours were only a trick my subconscious played, a great gift of the delusional, optimistic part of my brain. I shut it out. 

By the time I got to high school, my vision was sixty percent gone. I never really told anyone either because I knew they would say I'm sorry and that changes nothing. I was sorry too, what did I get? Blackening vision, that's what. I didn't want the last thing I saw to be pairs of worrying, pitying eyes looking at me. So I acted like everything was fine. I got extra time in tests and I would catch my teachers looking at me with pity when they thought I wasn't looking. I wasn't blind YET.  I could see them and that made me hate on the world even more. Now all I wanted to do was to get through high school and move onto a university, forgetting my past. Of course that didn't happen.

Life has a funny way of throwing curveballs at you. And my curveball named Brandon West hit me right across the face, stumbling me. No really, that's what happened. And I'm thankful for it every single day. You don't get it? Let's go back to my junior year, then.

It was the third week of junior year. I made it my mission to not to talk to anybody unless I had a very good reason to. I gave off a scary vibe and people stayed away. I liked that at the time. I thought that day would be the same as the others. Me getting up, wearing whatever I could find, going to school, listening and coming home. I had a very dull routine. That morning I woke up, put on some clothes, ate some cereal and made my way to school. I was fifteen minutes late because I took the bus, but of course the teacher didn't get mad at me. Nobody did because I was the girl going blind. I was the traumatic movie everyone watched and sobbed. Everyone loved those movies.

I sat next to a kid I haven't seen before because all the spots were taken. I didn't bother looking at him. I took my notebook out and continued to draw a tree I started to draw before. I used to do a lot of abstract paintings, now I only did drawings and didn't bother colouring. "Wow, that's really cool. You are talented." I felt every hair on my body stand up at the sound of someone's husky voice next to my ears. I looked at the kid, alarmed. "Why did you do that?" I said. My voice was filled with fear. He was blurry but I could feel that he got a bit scared too. "Nothing, I just complimented you." 

"Well, thanks but normal people would have done that without coming up on the other person." I snapped. I started to see even blurrier than before over the summer so everything startled me. I took a few deep breaths before I continued to draw. "Jeez, calm down. You don't need to get so worked up." I ignored him.