This was originally posted on March 9, 2015 at 9:29 AM on Blogger.com
***
“God bless you,” a hoarse, slightly Caribbean-accented voice says from beside me.
Is he talking to me? I wonder.
“Um, thank you,: I reply tentatively.
“Yes, bless you and I will pray for you.”
“Thank you,” if confusion only tinted my tone before, it was now fully colored in with a bright orange Crayola.
“I’ll ask God to help you get your sight back.”
Where’d it go? is what I think. I never had twenty/twenty but neither am I fully blind. Sure, I lost a bit of vision (I didn’t take my drops for a few years), but again, what exactly are you giving back…? What I say aloud, however, is another mumbled thank you.
Then a group of my raucous peers (otherwise known as teenagers, clamber onto the bus.
“Yo I think there’s a blind girl on tha bus,” a male voice.
Oh yeah? Where is she? I think to say belatedly.
“Look at her,” a female voice not to far from me.
“How does she do that?” Her friend asks.
How did I know they were talking about me? one might wonder.
“I think she textin'” says Girl One.
“And she not even lookin’!” was the brilliant reply of Girl Two.
Then, a few stops later, Hoarse Voice tells me to stay strong and that he would be praying…
sigh.
People are so contradictory. They say that everything happens for a reason, right? God has his reasons for doing everything? So why do you persist in trying to change it? Why am I brave for smiling and laughing. How am I any braver than the woman standing before me whose “problems aren’t so clear-cut?
But that rant is for another post.