Bastille Imagines

See The Light

When all of your flaws and all of my flaws...

Jumping aimlessly around in your room like the young, naive child that you are, swinging your hips side to side to the beat of the music. The summer holidays are finally here and school no longer exists for the next 7 weeks. A whole 7 weeks to yourself. What are you gonna do?

Are laid out one by one...

Well, for a start, you could clean your room. It's basically a pig sty with the amount of clothes and other miscellaneous objects lying around. Can you even see the floor? Although, you're not really that bothered about the mess, besides, it's your room.

The wonderful part of the mess that we've made...

Giving it another 5 minutes before you actually motivate yourself to do some chores, you swing round the room one more time, creatively swaying your body to the beat of the music. You indulge in music; it's what gets you through the day. Eyes closed, mind lost, body loose, and your dance moves still become evermore clumsier. You couldn't care about the mess, you couldn't care about life, you couldn't care about the atrocities that smother every inch of your room. There's always time to dance.

But maybe you should've cleaned your room...because you didn't see the cables sprawled out across the floor in a tangled mess.

That's when it happens. You lose your footing as it becomes enmeshed in the cables you carelessly left out. All balance is lost and your body comes crashing down to the wooden floor below you. Your life flashes before your eyes and time passes considerably quicker than what you're used to. It only takes a split second to realise your impending doom as you fall to the floor, head violently, and painfully, colliding with the corner of the wooden frame of your bed. And like that, you're out.

~~~

You still remember your traumatic head injury even to this day. Your naive mind only passed it off as a youthful accident: a one-time-accident-that-you-would-learn-from kind of thing. But no. This one stuck with you. You couldn't comprehend then how much that little, careless accident would impact your life because, even 5 and a half years on, you never made a full recovery.

"Mum, why can't I open my eyes?" you remember calling out to your mum searching for the safety of her touch.

"Honey, your eyes are open..." she cautiously replies, coating your hand with hers.

"But-but...I-I can't see."

Post-Traumatic Visual Loss. The late diagnosis from the doctors didn't quite sink in at the time, and it still hasn't. The injury to your head was so severe that it caused damage to the intracranial visual pathways and your eyesight never recovered, leaving you as blind as a bat.

Things started to change from then on; you started to rely more on auditory signals rather than visual. Slowly but surely, you learned to improve your perception of distance by use of other senses, to understand and use physical contact as a way of recognition, to memorise and familiarise yourself with the layout of cities, houses, and other known places. And surely after 5 and a half years of intense learning, you'd like to think that your hyperactive senses have adapted and became your eyes. Figuratively speaking, obviously. It's all settled into your lifestyle now, no thanks to your clumsiness.

Oh, and not to mention the help of Basil; your personal and most trusted guide dog.

Yes, of course it was difficult losing your eyesight. Nothing can really console you of the greater loss. You suffered phases upon phases of depression and multiple stages of hormone-triggered suicidal thoughts. Losing your sight made you feel worthless. Good for nothing. Useless. You were classed as disabled, vulnerable, helpless, and you despised that. You wanted to take on any task or challenge because no matter what, you weren't going to let your own stupidity screw you over. Devotion driven by motivation you kept telling yourself.