When the World Ends

Sight

She can't see without her contacts.

The world had ended awhile ago--many months back. We'd gotten quite far on foot, stopping in some places and continuing right through others. We'd managed to find several eye wear stores, but she was pretty blind, so we'd only found a few boxes of her contacts. Only one box was for her left eye, and the remaining three for her right.

Today, she's been wearing her last pair for over a month. They're one-month contacts, so she should have changed them awhile ago. But without them, she can't see.

I ask her about her glasses. She tells me that they make her dizzy, and that they throw off her depth perception. She's not used to them, because, for years, she's only had contacts.

Every time we'd come across an eye wear store, we'd scrounged in the rubble for anything that might be left. She had a single sample packet slightly above her prescription for her left eye, which she wore now, but it gave her a headache. I've begun to apologize every time we can't find her prescription, or every time I see her rub her forehead in pain. But she tells me it's not my fault.

Keane, she says when I apologize at seeing her massage her temples, don't say that. Stop saying that. It's not your fault, and it's not mine. Humans have become too reliant on what they have made, on all of their technology. Natural selection died out with technology, and the amount of people born with bad eyesight would've only kept increasing if the world hadn't ended. Plus, she adds, I have glasses if I have to use them. Many don't have what they need, and so they're gone now.

She says that last part sadly, and turns her face towards the ground. I look up at the gray sky, and realize that she's right. Humanity gave her life--when her appendix burst in middle school, surgery had saved her life--but it had also taken away from her--her sight. She relied on medicine too much, and her immune system managed to fight everything off, but only after she had contracted it. She'd grown up with crooked knees, and so had always been told to take medicine for the pain--now, she says, she doesn't need it. Pain is a part of this new world. Pain is the path to redemption and renewal.

But, when she says stuff like that, I can't help but notice the permanent hurt in her eyes. And I want to ask her if that is a part of it, but I don't, because I know the answer already.

Today, the tomorrow after yesterday, her left eye is red and swollen. I stop her and tell her she needs to take the contact out. Her left eye waters badly, but she tells me that she will--but not until she's washed her hands.

I sigh. She's always been very particular about this. She doesn't want to lose the little sight she has to this new world--the bacteria that she could have gotten back in civilization is nothing compared to the new bacteria that has come to be everywhere now.

I allow her to take up precious bag space with soap, and to waste precious drinking water, because I want to believe it will decrease our chances of getting sick. Here, you can't afford to get sick--if you're immobile, or too slow, the cold will catch you, and you'll die. But I also don't want her to lose her sight--not for necessarily the sake of either of us, but due to the way I see her look at color. Things with color are so rare now--mostly everything is gray--that she'll actually spend time to search for them.

A week ago, she found a pack of colored pencils. Each night, before she would go to sleep, I'd watch her draw a rainbow in vivid color, and I'd tried to remember what they'd actually looked like. Was her drawing accurate? I wanted to think it was.

She also loved to draw cartoon people--chibis, she called them. She'd draw the rainbow at the top of the page, and then, below it, she'd draw a different person each night.