Through Your Eyes

One

Perfection is utterly impossible to achieve, did you know that?

I never wanted to be perfect, because I knew I would fail from the start. I wasn't some special child genius growing up; I had no reason to believe I was. The moments that defined my life didn't necessarily come from other people—in fact—I grew the most when I was alone with nothing but the musical sounds that pulsed through my ears. You see, I live above a professional pianist. Sitting on the hardwood floor, I could actually imagine how my life could have been great, but alas I was here, trapped in a goddamn box called my apartment.

I didn't want to be in the place I was, but nothing stopped me from sinking this low. My mum once told me that her spirit was taken away from her by her former husband. But I've come to realize that no one can take away my spirit, because it is mine. No one is going to live my life for me, so I recognized that attitude is everything. And that's exactly what I was thinking about when I set foot onto the subway car.

I felt many stares on me, but I was used to it. I was noticeable, but it's not like I wanted to be. I had central vision loss in one eye, and the other had its own issues. At least I wasn't blind. Nonetheless, I guess you could say walking onto a crowded train during rush hour with a white cane was a tad cumbersome. Now don't get me wrong, I wasn't helpless. I remember the doctor describing the disease to my ex-boyfriend as if 'you were wearing sunglasses in a dark room'. Not impossible to see, just really fucking hard, no?

I remember the days when I could see colors in the sky with ease; my childhood was pretty damned fantastic. Too bad my mum didn't want anything to do with a visually impaired daughter. When the doctor told me what was happening, all mum could think about was the gossip that would ensue from the neighbors, her coworkers, churchgoers, and her country club friends. She blamed the sperm donor—the nickname she created for my absent father—because she knew as well as I that it was genetic. I was in no place to be an embarrassment, so my mother silently transferred me to a boarding school in the city, away from the safety of her suburb bubble. What a nice gesture of her.

And I mean, I get it. JMD sucks to deal with. When the doctors told me I had best vitelliform macular dystrophy at the early age of fifteen, the irony killed me. My mum has stressed the idea of perfection on me for my entire life, and I got stuck with Best Disease. Yeah, it sure felt like I was the best person to get best. How would a normal teenager react to the news of a cyst in the eye? I guess I should be thankful that I was one of the luckier ones. I could still see in one eye. Even if it wasn't ideal, the disease gave me the freedom from my mother that I so desperately craved.

My mother, Julie Stone, wanted everything in her life to be impeccable; she inherited everything she has now from her father's passing. Her wealth was her pride and joy—that's right—definitely not me. I was cherished until the news. Sometimes when I'm sitting on that wooden floor, I think about how scared Julie probably was. Honestly I spent a great deal of time trying to come up with some justification for her decisions with me. I don't think she listened to anything the doctors said to her. She knew that I wasn't going to go crazy, she had to of known that the disease wouldn't affect anything else of who I was. She had to of known.

It's been two and a half years since that day, and my eighteenth birthday was coming up next month. It felt like a really big milestone for me, because I would finally be free one-hundred percent from Julie Stone. When I turned sixteen, she found the perfect school an hour from her home. I was pretty numb to the decision personally. She said it would be good for me; Julie didn't want me to use my disease as a crutch. I think she was making it out to be worse than it really was. I could still see, and you couldn't even tell I had a problem by just looking at my grey eyes. Granted, JMD made me accident prone, but was that really the fault of the disease?