Something You Should Know

I was prescribed my first set of glasses in the second grade. The ones I picked out at the optometrist's were thin-rimmed, almost perfectly round, and mottled blue. Mottled, because they were splatter-painted (faux?) as many things tended to be in the early 1990's. Aesthetically, they pleased me, but their intrinsic purpose made me uneasy. I felt this was another one of those tricks, the vitamins disguised as orange-flavor candy. The chalky aftertaste was always a dead giveaway– deception.

I remember first trying them on in the car, pressing them to my face, slowly, cautiously, like the first step on the moon landing. Peering from behind the plastic disks, a distressing thing occurred. The trees had changed. It was summer, and what before had been a dizzyingly lush effusion of green watercolors, pulsating hypnotically like seaweed in a crosscurrent, suddenly took on the hard, defined edges of an anatomical drawing; the world was screaming lines, eviscerating precision, headaches. I immediately removed the glasses. In the way that my grandmother decided about Thai food once and for all upon first tasting it at a restaurant, I thought -oh no, no, no. THIS is not for me- and got to losing the glasses in the most ingenious of places, ever accompanied with the most noble, pitiable of circumstances when held for questioning. I did this until I succeeded in breaking them, and then repeated the process on the successors throughout my childhood, which, viewed together (if any but a few pathetic limbless specimens still exist), would inform a contemporary understanding of ocular fashion evolutions from the 1990's into our current decade.