**_
_**I went to the eye doctor today.
Dissected more questions out of routine procedure.
Made familiar small talk with him about how school’s going and what I'm doing this summer.
Like I was the kind of girl who makes plans for nexts and afters.
Someone novel and vulgar,
stuffed full of fluffed polyester dreams.

I read the letter chart as if anything I've read has ever permeated my derogatory ideals.
The figures descending into unclarity,
the way I descend into myself at the sight of anything distinguished,
only facing more inward usual uncertainty. 
 

I placed my chin and forehead against the machine and pretended it was the hands of something greater cupping my face.
Something worth a hundred something’s.
The hands of possibility touching my skin with tendency,
bleeding nutrition into my pores.

I stared into the little red barn distanced from my irises. 
A tidy scene left imagined,
like every bettered variety of me rushing the wrong ways.
Never knowing how fast I’m going until I hit something tangible,
before the flash of white light dismantles me like my own reflection.


As the doctor peered down my retinas,
dialing in on my dilation, studying my impairment. 
I wondered if he could explain to me why I’ve lacked a clear perception my whole life.
Although my eyes have been distasteful and deceiving since I can remember,
the little time I recall of the world before my vision was epiphanized is all too appealing.
Before it all turned sharp and fateful like the tips of my teeth or my dads favorite song.
Before I knew of anything less or anything more. 
Before every potential was accompanied by a eulogy.


I find myself dreaming of that place often, in my sleep when I'm coiled into myself.
Stuck in bloom, leaking air into trapped spaces between my ribs.
I pray for release, of unfurling into that hazy horizon of a world. 
Tree lines blended together and mirrors left faceless, 
full of anonymity and aptitude.
No beginnings and no ends, choice without consequence.
A spinning hourglass never piling at the ends.
I despair over the fact I will never really return this dream,
I cannot erase the images passed through me.
I cannot convert the after to before.                                            Repetition of this realization lives in me like religion.                                 

Once more I begged the question if he could see through to my mind, alike to everyone who ever looked at me.
If he could see along the walls of my skull,
graffitied with tallied off reason.
Remembrance carved into the corners,
alienated with a million autopsied actions.
Impacted memories upon the ground,
scraps of hatred and white hot desire.
Missing pieces here and there.
Prayer and animosity and abhorrence bouncing off each other,
against all the sorry parts of me.

The parts of me I swear to secrecy, utmost to myself.
The squishy soft spots of my brain poisoned by my pestilent inclinations.
How often I wonder what the ground feels like from fifteen stories up, at what point flying turns to falling.
Which photo would be chosen for my obituary.
Maybe the one of me standing on a rock when I was seven, 
I look free there.
How a trees embrace would feel if I wrapped my car around it, if it would hug me like no one ever did.
If my vision, if the world, would once more fall comfortingly unfocused in death. 

He examines my eyes a final time.
Seeking the outermost extremities and furthest floors.
He is looking to the bottom of the same eyes that have eaten and regurgitated every sight I ever saw.
It feels inordinately personal,
as if he is staring at the very cause and result of my detriments that not even I know.
Translating back to him the insatibility of my insanities, 
all the little segments of my ironic idiocy.

A terribly false, terribly readable thing I am.
Waiting viciously for him to hand me a prophylactic as to why I am so visually inept. 
Why I fake small talk
and fight to decipher everything
and feel hands everywhere 
and wished everything could be a little less
Why I am so destructively inclined.
Instead of an answer I am left with a cheap goodbye
and a new prescription that will leave my view even more painfully clear,
painfully permanent.

I blink the doctor away and try to savor the softness of dilation a little longer. 
Try to remain in the illusionary innominate world before I grew so examined. 
Before the lenses of life made me so apparent,
plagued with analysis.
Stole me from the view of never knowing anything more.