How he looked at me, like I was going to get this, all of it.
As we ran through his exercise a few more times before we ate, I couldn’t perfectly capture that first epiphany but it was all still so good, that feeling of turning a theory on its head with observable evidence—like yeah, I “know” my other four senses are effective in gathering information about my environment, maybe even as effective as the one that’s limited, but there’s such a universe in that half turn from “know” to evidence.
Beautiful evidence, lighting up dark places in my brain, and then those new, lit-up areas start positing theories of their own, suggesting glorious experimentation, reassuring me that maybe, maybe, that what made me me was possible to prove in a number of different ways.
Like, how we know a virus is in the body because of the unique symptoms it produces in the patient and because of a titer of that virus we can count in the blood and because our own immune system produces brand-new antibodies against the virus that we can find in the blood, too.
All the same virus, proven different ways.
Closing my eyes, no vision at all available to me, the sight I depend on and that delights me so much, I felt so unlike myself that I had wanted to cry.
I mean it when I say that nowhere else, except nearly with Evan, not with my mom or Dr. Allen or coworkers or friends have I cried. Or gotten angry. And Evan hasn’t really seen me cry. He’s seen some stray, frustrated tears. And yeah, he’s seen my anger and noncompliance.
He’s tried to train me to use night-vision-adaptive equipment that I won’t even pick up off the table, he’s sent home CDs of software I’m supposed to install on my computers at home and at work so that my computers recognize my voice and they’re still in my purse.
I think I could draw the pattern of fake wood grain from the tabletop in the therapy room from memory, so often have I stared at it and traced it with my finger instead of doing whatever it is he wants me to do.
Instead of acknowledging Evan, or his help, or his existence, really.
I can still see, I yelled at him last week, my throat tight, because it had no idea how to really do the whole yelling thing. Stop, just stop. You’re doing more to take away my vision than this disease is.
And then he had let out a breath, uncontrolled, like I’d hit him in the stomach.
I’d looked at him, one arm over his chest, one fist at his mouth, like he had to hold in yelling back at me.
I wanted him to. I wanted him to yell at me.
I wanted something mean and hard to shove back against and scream at, and since it couldn’t be my mom or Dr. Allen, or my lab colleagues, or my worried friends I wasn’t calling, he was tagged as it.
I had stared at him across that table last week, breathing hard, willing him to answer me with a lecture or with anger or irritation, anything to give me an excuse.
I was right there in that moment, too, I wasn’t floating above my body or feeling all weird, it was me, and I was mad, and Evan could just so go suck it.
He stared back, his wide eyebrows steepled, his forehead all wrinkly, his fist at his mouth.
When I realized he wouldn’t give me what I needed, I stood up, so fast the plastic school chair I was sitting in banged to the floor behind me. I had tripped over it twice, stomping out, hating how big and unwieldy I felt in my own body, hating Evan.
Hating this thing no one understood or could predict or control.
Then, after all that last week, I walked in today, and he had told me to hang up my things and meet him in the foyer.
He had walked past me to leave the therapy room, looked at me, and I realized he was making a concession.
Not in that room, not today.
We wouldn’t have to be together in that room anticipating the worst possible thing I could imagine happening to me.
Then, he had made me close my eyes and given me evidence to examine and catalog and consider.
I’m sure my mom could write a poem about it, how he made me close my eyes and gave me back some of the vision I had lost, and all I can say is that what happened is something like that and something much more fun, too.
If you’re a scientist, moments like today where the experiment is running well and there is so much information coming back from it you’ll never be able to sort through it in your lifetime, well, that’s fun.
Then he had told me that I was the one, all along, leading the way.
Which is maybe why, at the end, before I had to run to meet my bus because I had actually almost lost track of time, I hugged him.
Tight, too, one of my patented Jenny Wright hugs that friends ask for, particularly, when they need some squishy happiness.
He’d said oof, and I squeezed him and pushed my face against his collarbone, smiling, all high from everything that I’d learned.